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"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

The FBI, meanwhile, was very familiar with Lebed. In May 1951, the CIA asked Hoover if the Bureau wished to use Lebed, who, the Agency said, was "active for many years in Ukrainian resistance movements." [146] Since this seems to be a rare case of the CIA offering to share an agent, the Agency might have been hoping to enlist the FBI's aid against a snowballing INS investigation. The FBI looked into Lebed's past as best it could by retrieving information it received in 1943 from British intelligence concerning Ukrainian terrorism and Lebed's role in the Pieracki assassination. It also examined a small trove of captured German General Staff documents from 1943 and 1944, which revealed German appreciation with the work of the UPA while mentioning Lebed by name. [147] The New York field office also questioned a Ukrainian informant, Peter Jablon, a former member of the OUN security service, who claimed that Lebed was a German collaborator and assassin who would "use American intelligence for his own benefit." [148]

Still, Hoover gave orders that Lebed, owing to his anti-Communism, should be interviewed with a view toward possibly "developing [him] as a potential source of information concerning Ukrainian groups ... in the United States." When questioned, Lebed gave the FBI a sanitized version of his past. [149] When asked about Jablon's charges, Lebed said that Jablon was a "strange man" who seemed to be pathologically ill. [150]

There is no evidence that the FBI ever used Lebed, but there is no evidence that it helped the INS much, either. When asked in May 1951, the Bureau told the INS that they had no objection to the latter's investigation of Lebed, and Jablon's statements of a year earlier were even provided to the INS. [151] Later, when Dulles requested permanent resident status for Lebed, the INS forwarded the Dulles letter to Hoover and asked Hoover to reply to the INS "with any comments you desire to make." [152] Since the FBI had already shared the Jablon statements, INS surely expected a measure of support. Hoover, however, replied that "based on the available information [the FBI] has no comments to make." [153] Hoover could have shared a great deal of information from German staff records and from British intelligence, but these are not in Lebed's INS file.

In the following months, the FBI continued to collect information on Lebed, including interviews with Jablon in 1953. The FBI also found Army Intelligence reports that confirmed parts of Jablon's statements, which the FBI sent to the CIA but not to the INS. [154] Lebed, meanwhile, continued to work for the CIA. The full extent of his activities as "Foreign Minister" may never become known, but FBI surveillance of hi m gives some idea. Partly, Lebed lectured at prestigious universities such as Yale on such topics as biological warfare used by the Soviet government in the Ukraine. [155] From 1956 to the mid-1960s, Lebed was active as the chief of a firm in New York called the Prolog Research and Publishing Association, which apparently directed agents in Eastern Europe and which, according to some, received its funding from the CIA. In any event, Lebed does not seem to have read any manuscripts for the press. [156]

FBI files on Nazi collaborators in the United States are an important source of information about the wartime and postwar activities of these figures, most of whom are nor mentioned prominently, if at all, in secondary literature or even in German wartime records. For example, there is more information on the wartime activities of Lebed in FBI records than in the records of the German General Staff itself.

Examining these records, one can reach conclusions about the FBI's position -- and that of other U.S. agencies -- regarding Nazi collaborators after the war. The Bureau was vigilant during World War II in watching Axis officials, spies, bank accounts, and businesses in the entire Western Hemisphere. After the war, it remained vigilant only to a point. [157] The newly released records do not demonstrate that the FBI planned or condoned the immigration of lesser Axis officials and collaborationists who had slipped into the United States. Nevertheless, once these men were in the United States, the FBI, as the nation's chief federal law enforcement agency, did not create for itself an especially distinguished record.

______________

Notes:

1. This was the official Hymn of the American Branch of the Hungarian Warriors Comradeship Association, described in this chapter.

2. Such was the tenor of Congressional discussions leading to the Holtzman Amendment of 1978 and the creation of the Office of Special Investigations within the Department of justice in 1979. Both steps aimed to correct INS mistakes. Allan A. Ryan, Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), chapter 2.

3. FBI records from the war years contain voluminous material on FBI investigations of Nazi spies, German businessmen, and German sympathizers in the United States and in Latin America during the war. Such records are beyond the scope of this study, but they make possible significant new scholarship on German activity in the Western Hemisphere.

4. For the most part, records involving these operations were not declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act unless suspected Nazi war criminals were involved.

11. Report by Robert E. Mangan, 6 May 1955, NA, RG 65, 105-35311-7, box 71. Information garnered later determined the following: John had become mayor of the Stolpce region when German occupation forces arrived there in late June 1941. He served at the pleasure of the Germans until their retreat in July 1944. During John's mayoralty, Jews were confined to a ghetto that John -- at the German behest -- ordered built in the fall of 1941. He identified Poles who could be a political threat to the Germans. He passed German orders, such as the Jewish star decree, to lesser mayors in the Stolpce region. He was also in office as the entire Jewish population of the Stolpce region was used for slave labor and executed in shooting operations carried out by the Germans and Byelorussian auxiliaries between 1941 and 1943. Indeed, by August 1943, the Germans on the spot could report that "The District of Stolpce is ... free of Jews." Schultz (Hauptwachmeister d. Schutzpolizei u. Posternfuhrer, Stolpce) to Gebietsfuhrer Baranowitsche, 8 Aug. 1943, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, RG 002M, roll 4. For the context of this document in the case of John Avdzej, I benefited from an interview with Eli Rosenbaum, 28 Oct. 2003.

14. See, for example, the case of Ludwig Miechciski, who was accused of having collaborated with the Germans in the killing of Jews in Podhajce, Poland. The FBI questioned him thoroughly, but in the face of his denials, they could take the case no further. NA, RG 65, 105-10074, box 65.

15. See chapter 8.

16. Summary in Ryan, Quiet Neighbors, 142-153.

17. Artukovic received bail in September 1951, which would have allowed him to flee the United States had he wished. He also received the benefit of the doubt when he denied all responsibility for Ustasa crimes. In addition, he was granted the argument that the 1901 U.S. extradition treaty with Serbia was void owing to the federal status of Yugoslavia. Most importantly, he was granted a stay of deportation on the argument that the crimes of which Yugoslavia had accused him were "political" in nature and that he would suffer political (i.e., Communist) persecution if he were to return; Ryan, Quiet Neighbors, 155-85.

18. Hoover to [excised] 9 July 1951, NA, RG 65, 100-361810-EBF 123, box 75. Copies of This is Artukovic are included in this FBI file. See also "FBI Accuses Titoists of Smearing," The Register (Santa Ana, CA), 17 June 1958; and "Reds Want Him," The Washington Post, 19 Sept. 1957.

21. On Pearson and Salinger, see W. R. Wannall to Asst. Director William C. Sullivan, 7 June 1962, NA, RG 65, 100-361810-56, box 74-75. For "Facts on Himmler of Yugoslavia," see The Washington Post, June 25, 1962. The FBI had on occasion listened in on Pearson's telephone conversations and read his letters. See Athan Theoharis, From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover (Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1991), 205-08; 279-80, 342.

23. On the Szalasi government and the Holocaust in Hungary in general see Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, 2 vols., condensed edition, (1981; Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2000.)

25. On the organization of the Kopjas, see also the Strategic Services Unit report from X-2, Italy, "The Kopjas Movement," 13 June 1946, which states that at that time, some Kopjas were in Austria. NA, RG 226, entry 211, box 48, folder 5, field HQ file, JRX-3547 WN-20455.

29. CIA to Director, FBI, 21 May and 21 June 1950, NA, RG 65, 97-2994-5, box 1. According to the CIA, the MHBK maintained a strategic office under General Lajos Nadas, a former member of the Hungarian General Staff of German (Swabian) Heritage who, according to a reliable FBI informant, "exhibited most rabid pro-Nazi tendencies during World War II." In fact, OSS had known in 1945 that Nadas had been Szalasi's military adviser. Report by James L. Startzell, 2 June 1950, NA, RG 65, 97-2994-3, box 1; British "Derailed Interrogation Report," 6824 DIC (MIS)/EI 36, 11 June 1945, NA, RG 332, box 93. Six sources were interrogated.

30. The text of the letter is reproduced in SAC New York to Director, FBI, 28 Sept. 1949, NA, RG 65, 97-2994-64, box 1.

31. By 1955 the MH BK had eighteen such offices, most notably in Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and St. Louis. See NA, RG 65, 97-2994-33, box 1.

38. Agh had in fact sponsored a Hungarian blood drive on the radio as early as 1951. Hennrich to Bellmont, 1 Nov. 1951, NA, RG 65, 97-2994-20, box 1.

39. Speech printed in Hungarian Fidelity, 6-7. The final paragraph is from Agh's description of the MHBK, 2.

40. For the explanation, see Agh's invitation, sent to the FBI Philadelphia field office, NA, RG 65, 97-2994-38, box 1. The mixture of Hungarian and U.S. symbols was present in other MH BK publications sent to the FBI.

43. Though the FBI files contain little on Agh's other governmental contacts, it is clear that Agh lobbied others, even within the Congress, possibly for money that could be used for intelligence gathering in Europe. In April 1952, Congressman Charles J. Kerstein of Wisconsin wrote a friendly letter to Agh, claiming, "I cannor over estimate the value of your work. It is most important to register ... individuals who have had substantial experience in warfare against the Soviets. And also, it is highly important to keep information compiled on military preparations behind the Iron Curtain." Kerstein to Agh, 23 Apr. 1952, NA, RG 65, 97-2994-68, box 1.

46. Numerous witness testimonies corroborate one another. For details, see United States Department of Justice, INS, file A-6-801-064, Newark, 7 Oct. 1960, report by William B. Taffett, Special Inquiry Officer. I am indebted to the staff of the Office of Special Investigations, Department of Justice, for providing me with this report.

49. Ibid. It is difficult to say how INS investigators learned of the admission to Roth. INS investigators in Newark learned it from the FBI field office there. See Goldberg to Hoover, 14 July 1958, NA, RG 65, 97-2994-42, box 1.

53. United States Department of Justice, INS, file A-6-801-064, Newark, 7 Oct. 1960, report by William B. Taffett, Special Inquiry Officer. I am indebted to the staff of the Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations for providing me with this report.

54. United States Department of Justice, Board of Immigration Appeals, 11 Aug. 1961. The Department of Just ice Office of Special Investigations kindly provided me with this report.

62. Acheson was convinced on good evidence that the Patriarch Justinian himself was completely subservient to the Communist government in Romania. Acheson to U.S. Legation Bucharest, 19 Oct. 1950, NA, RG 65, 100-225319-1-2, box 31.

66. O'Hara was the former Regent of the Apostolic Nunciature in Bucharest. Expelled by the Romanian Government in 1950, he now served in that capacity in Dublin. Kirk was the former head of the Roman Catholic Mission for Europe. See Hoover's correspondence with the Legal Attaches in London and Madrid, of Apr., May, and Nov. 1952 in NA, RG 65, 100- 225319-2, box 32.

70. The State Department attempted to delay the consecration ceremony after receiving information on Trifa from Dr. Charles Kremer, President of the United Romanian Jews of America. Theodorovich refused to delay the ceremony, however. See Washington field office to Hoover, 23 Apr. 1952; Hoover to Assistant Attorney General James McInerney, 26 Apr. 1952; State Department Memorandum of Conversation between Father John Hundiak and A.G. Sherer (East Europe Desk), 8 Apr. 1952; all in NA, RG 65,105-14006-25-(31-34), box 158.

81. The text of the pamphlet, Communistic Attempts the Gain Control Over American Church Organization: The Facts Behind the Romanian Orthodox Missionary Episcopate in America, published in 1952 by the Public Relations Office of thc Romanian Orthodox Episcopate in America, is in the Episcopate's communication to Hoover, 31 Mar. 1952, NA, RG 65, 105- 14006-3, box 159.

82. Hoover to John W. Ford, 30 Apr. 1953, NA, RG 65-105-14006-3, box 159. On the Romanian Government's use of Church positions in 1953, the CIA reported in June that the 1948 appointment of Archimandrite Martinian Ivanovici in Paris by the Romanian Ministry of Cults was backed by the former head of Romanian intelligence, Emil Bodnaras. See NA, RG 65,105-14006-3-73, box 159.

89. Hoover to Nixon, 16 June 1955, ibid. There are no actual reports of Martin's moral character, but the FBI file on Trifa does point out that, since September 1951, there had been twenty-two reports based on Martin's information received by the FBI, NA, RG 65,105-14006-4- 110, box 159.

93. See the excellent analysis of Rech and Sokolov in Robert E. Hertzstein, "Anti-Jewish Propaganda in the Orel Region of Great Russia, 1942-1943: The German Army and its Russian Collaborators," Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 6, chapter 2.

107. The comment as well as those from Vera Schwartz, Mark Weinbaum, and Alexander Dallin, are in Report by Harold Palatsky, 21 Nov.-2 Dec. 1958, ibid.

108. Dallin, German Rule in Russia.

109. Oktan, and in this case Sokolov as well, were part of abortive efforts by the German Ministry of Propaganda to establish a basis of Nazism within Russian groups. Oktan, a former Soviet journalist-turned-collaborator, led the League for the Struggle against Bolshevism. See Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 525n1.

114. Most of the documentation on Sokolov's FBI activity while at Yale is either redacted or withheld as irrelevant to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. See, however, Director, FBI to SAC New Haven, 25 May 1959, NA, RG 65, 100-409764-12, box 39.

115. Simpson, Blowback, discusses the Lebed case with the aid of the dossier kept on Lebed by Army CIC (part of which was provided by FOIA requests, all of which is now declassified thanks to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act), a dossier on Lebed kept in the Israeli Holocaust archive at Yad Vashem provided by Lebed's former ally Mykyta Kosakivs'kky, and interviews conducted with Lebed himself.

116. The variety of Ukrainian nationalist groups and the split within the OUN between the more radical Bandera faction and the more moderate Mel'nyk faction is discussed in detail in John A. Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 1939-1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 31ff.

117. On OUN contacts before the war and in 1939, see Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 114-19; Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism.

118. For the Declaration of the Ukrainian State Government sent to Adolf Hitler under a congratulatory letter of "sincere gratitude and admiration for your heroic army," see Ukrainische Regierung, No. 1/41 , 3 July 1941, Bundesarchiv (Berlin) R 43 II/ 1500. See also Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 119-22.

119. German police reports dated October 1941 report that "fanatic" Bandera followers, organized in small groups, were "extraordinarily active" against Jews and Communists. See Philip Friedman, "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations during the Nazi Occupation," YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 12 (1958-1959) 266n 12.

122. See the Einsatzgruppen reports from the West Ukraine from July 1941 to July 1943 in Bundesarchiv (Berlin), R 58/219, R 58/221, R 70/31, R 58/220, R 58/217, R 58/215, R 58/698, R 70/204, R 58/220, R 70/31. On the use of Jews by the UPA, see Friedman, "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations," 284-85.

127. On the formation of the UPA and UHVR, see Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 620-22; and Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, chapter 6. By the fall of 1943, the Bandera group was in control of the country districts of Volhynia and southwestern Polessia, while the Germans controlled the towns in the region. The Soviets advanced into Volhynia in February 1944.

132. For this rendering of the facts, see the memo by Special CIC Agent Camille S. Hadju of the 970th CIC Detachment, 17 Nov. 1947, with enclosures, NA, RG 319, IRR, entry 134B, Mikola Lebed. A translated synopsis of Lebed's booklet UPA was ordered by the FBI and can be found in NA, RG 65,105-12528-9, box 128.

144. Dulles to Mackey, 5 May 1952, NA, RG 263, Mikola Lebed Name File. There is a copy of this letter in Lebed's FBI file, as well. For Lebed's admission to the Pieracki assassination, see the MI-5 records in the FBI file. Lebed would deny complicity when questioned by the INS in April 1952. See Questionnaire Submitted to Mr. Lebed, 8 Apr. 1952, NA, RG 263, Mikola Lebed Name File.

155. "Underground Ukraine War Bared Here," New Haven Journal-Courier, February 14, 1951; Jaro Halat, "The Assassin and the Admiral," The New Leader, 28 July 1951, 10. Halat was another pseudonym for Peter Jablon.

No CASE ILLUSTRATES THE MORAL, political, and operational complexities in the postwar intelligence world better than that of Wilhelm Hottl, an SD intelligence officer. Hottl established contacts with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC), the West German Defense Ministry, and even the KGB. The release of his voluminous CIA Name File, which comprises over 1600 pages, along with previously withheld OSS records, substantially fills out what has been known about Hottl from Army Counterintelligence records. Hottl was an unapologetic Nazi who helped to expropriate assets from and annihilate Jews, particularly in Hungary in 1944. He was, furthermore, an unusually corrupt man who wove intricate lies as he built contacts, stashed secret funds, and enhanced his personal standing. He maintained these traits his entire life. Hottl's career serves as a mirror, reflecting the nature of each intelligence organization that had contact with him. In the end, U.S. intelligence agencies determined to crush him professionally and bury all evidence of contact with him once the possibility was clear that he was working for the Soviets and that his past association with the United States could become public knowledge.

Hottl's Nazi Background

Hottl's SS personnel records comprise one of the longest SS officer files. [1] Born in Vienna in 1915, Hottl became a dedicated Nazi even as a student. His association with Nazi groups began illegally in Austria -- even before Hitler's takeover in Germany. In 1931, at age 16, Hottl joined the NS-Schulerbund; he joined the SS at age 18. In March 1934, he became an SS student leader and soon did illegal work for the SD in Vienna. Long before he received his doctorate in history from the University of Vienna in 1937, he had cast his lot with the Nazis. After Germany annexed Austria, Hottl continued his SD work in Vienna, now legally, working on anti-Jewish and Freemason issues. Thanks to what his SS file labels as "outstanding achievements," he was charged with the leadership of Referat VI (intelligence) in the Vienna SD office in December 1940. [2]

Here Hottl's corruption and influence peddling quickly began to irritate his SS superiors, especially his repeated intervention on behalf of American-born countess Dorothy Palffy. Whether the countess provided Hottl with his initial entree into the Palffy family is hard to say, but count Fidel Palffy-leader of the pro-German, Nazi-style United National Socialist Party -- later became a chief contact for Hottl in Budapest. [3] For the moment, the countess was one of Hottl's best intelligence sources, and he tried to return the favor by working through German authorities in Upper Austria, Cracow, and Warsaw to secure confiscated Jewish property for her. "I have known this woman for many years," he said, "and can confirm that she is anything but a friend to the Jews, [though] her anti-Semitism as a full-blooded American is naturally different than is ours ... " [4] When Hottl got into trouble for his efforts, he claimed that Reinhard Heydrich himself had sanctioned this intelligence relationship. [5] Already dead, Heydrich could neither confirm nor deny this claim. In addition, large sums had disappeared from an SD bank account in Vienna while Hottl was there.

Hottl's superior, SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Friedrich Polte, took these matters to higher channels in October 1941. Hottl was a fine intelligence officer in terms of his eagerness and volume, Polte said, but he was also "the typical troublesome Viennese -- a liar, a toady, a schemer, and a pronounced operator." [6] Hottl was removed from SD duties and assigned to the eastern front as a war correspondent. He remained there for most of 1942, defending himself against a snowballing investigation. He had been a loyal Nazi since 1931, he said, risking even the gallows before 1938 as he "worked for the liberation of the Ostmark [Austria]." After listing his many Hitler Youth decorations, he concluded, "I have had recognized successes in the struggle against the Church, Jews and Freemasons." [7]

Hottl's deliverance came with the appointment of fellow Austrian Ernst Kaltenbrunner as chief of the RSHA in January 1943. By the following month, Hottl was back in the RSHA in Berlin on Kaltenbrunner's insistence, and the investigation was dropped. Hottl's recall was due in part to Kaltenbrunner's need to create a core of loyal Austrians within the RSHA to counteract Walter Schellenberg's close relationship with Heinrich Himmler. [8] And Hottl's expertise on southeastern Europe, Kaltenbrunner said, made him indispensable. [9]

Hottl's rise under Kaltenbrunner was noteworthy. He served as chief of the Italian Desk for SD Foreign Intelligence, and he played a role in Mussolini's rescue in September 1943 by working with the German embassy in Rome. [10] He also assisted in the German capture of count Galeazzo Ciano's diplomatic notes in January 1944, shortly before Ciano's execution. [11] Hottl's reward came in October 1943, when Kaltenbrunner insisted that he be promoted to the rank of SS-Sturmbannfuhrer, despite the fact that he had yet to reach the requisite age of 30. The reason, Kaltenbrunner said, was Hottl's role in bringing Amt VI (Foreign Police Intelligence) into the Mussolini rescue, which the Fuhrer himself had recognized. The promotion was made retroactive to September 11,1943, the day before the rescue operation. [12]

Hottl was most devastating in Hungary, where he had built contacts with members of the pro-Nazi Hungarian right. He generally avoided Ferenc Szalasi's Arrow Cross party, since Hottl suspected that Szalasi would pursue Hungarian rather than German interests. His contacts lay rather with people and parties who would happily hand Hungary's Jews over for destruction, such as Count Palffy's United National Socialists and Bela Imredy's Party of Hungarian National Life. These ties became even more valuable after the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944.

Kaltenbrunner himself arrived in Budapest on March 19 with the aim of establishing a new Hungarian government that would help Adolf Eichmann and his subordinates to round up, deport, and destroy Hungary's 725,000 Jews. The new Prime Minister was Hungarian Lieutenant General Dome Szt6jay, Hungarian Ambassador to Berlin since 1935. His interior ministry was dominated by Hottl's proteges, Laszlo Baky and Laszlo Endre, two leading Hungarian National Socialists. "This was a government," noted historian Ronald Zweig, "streamlined to do exactly what Hottl and his [55] superiors in Berlin had been planning for years." Indeed, Hottl remained in Budapest as more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Birkenau and gassed between April and June 1944. [13]

Hottl and OSS

Like several SS officers, Hottl tried to ingratiate himself with the Americans toward the war's end. He had two primary motives. First, he hoped to avoid prosecution as a war criminal and perhaps even become part of a transitional Austrian government. [14] Second, he hoped to get his hands on a hoard of stolen Jewish loot.

Hottl had had a lengthy association with Colonel Arpad Toldi, who became Hungary's Commissioner for Jewish Affairs under the Szalasi regime in October 1944.15 In February 1945, Toldi was in charge of the famous Hungarian Gold Train, which was loaded with tons of valuable Jewish belongings confiscated by the Hungarian government. With the Red Army fanning out across Hungary, Toldi needed to find a safe place to hide the train in Austria. Hottl knew all about the Gold Train; so did an Austrian friend of his, Friedrich Westen, who profited from expropriations of Jewish property and Jewish slave labor. [16]

In February 1945, Hottl had Westen make contact with Allen Dulles, the OSS representative in Bern. Dulles was intrigued by the chance that Hottl, as Kaltenbrunner's representative, might help with a separate Austrian peace while acting as a wedge within the SD. In early March 1945, Dulles atranged for an intermediary to meet Hottl at the Swiss-Austrian border. [17] Hottl made several trips to Switzerland in the spring of 1945, posing as Kaltenbrunner's "peace envoy" to the OSS. Kaltenbrunner never reconciled Hottl's Swiss contacts with his own loyalty to Hitler. Though it was clear to the OSS that Hottl had played a role in Hungary during the Jewish deportations there, [18] his closeness to Kaltenbrunner might offer a key to the so-called Alpine Redoubt.

The redoubt was a supposedly impregnable fortress into which the Germans were to pour their last reserves for a final, bloody stand, but in the end it was "a sink-hole that sucked in the odds and ends of a dying regime."19 The Allies, thanks to aerial photography, knew of the extensive preparations to fortify and supply the area. The Allies also received overblown SD reports designed to give an impression of the redoubt's impregnability in order to draw the Allies to the negotiating table. Given the intelligence mistakes that had preceded the Allied disaster in the Ardennes in December 1944, such information had to be taken seriously. [20]

Hottl understood and exploited Allied concerns. In mid-April, more than ten days before the German surrender in Italy, Hottl reported to the OSS that a number of senior generals would retreat to the redoubt, including High Command of the Armed Services (OKW) Chief Wilhelm Keitel, Field Marshal Ferdinand Schorner, and Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the last of whom had become notorious by now for not cooperating with SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Karl Wolff's surrender plans in Italy. "[Field Marshal Alexander] Lohr's men from Croatia are almost certain to get there," said the same OSS report based on Hottl's intelligence. Hottl added that Werwolf, the inchoate Nazi guerrilla movement, should be taken seriously, too. It had been well organized for the past two years with concealed arms depots, explosives, ample hidden funds, and 100,000 reliable SS men under Otto Skorzeny, another Austrian. [21]

But there was a solution. Hottl told his American interlocutors that Kaltenbrunner had entrusted him with contacting Austrian anti-Nazi (and anti-Communist) circles and that he had indeed contacted numerous worker and Catholic opposition leaders. Hottl said he was chosen because his father, Karl Hottl, was a well-known socialist Austrian school reformer. [22] OSS Chief William Donovan argued that "1 am convinced [that Hottl] is the right hand man of Kaltenbrunner," and thus a key contact to develop. [23] Hottl's comments, Donovan said, lay "well within the range of possibility," for if "certain SS elements are trying to save their skins by turning to the West ... to follow [a] line which will obviate [the] necessity of their joining [the] die-hards in [a] last-ditch struggle [then] these trends offer [the] possibility of checkmating any future organization of [the] German reduit." Donovan even postulated that Himmler himself was "pulling the strings ... and possibly preparing himself to desert the die-hards." [24]

Hottl was lying. An OSS check on Karl Hottl revealed that he was indeed a social democratic reformer, but that he was not related to Wilhelm. [25] A source in London further commented that Hottl was "long identified with [the] extremist clique" and that Kaltenbrunner could hardly send him on his mission to Switzerland without the news reaching Schellenberg and Heinrich Himmler. It seemed more likely that Hard was a tool for "embroiling [the] Western Powers with [the] Russians since negotiations [are] likely to become known." [26]

One senior OSS officer, Edgeworth Murray Leslie, viewed Hottl's ambiguity as an asset that could help end the war. "[Hottl] is, of course, dangerous ... "

He is a fanatical anti-Russian and for this reason we cannot very well collaborate with him ... without informing the [R]ussians. But I see no reason why we should not use him in the furtherance of [common] interests ... namely, the hastening of the end of the resistance in Austria by the disruption of the Reduit.

To avoid any accusation that we are working with a Nazi reactionary ... 1 believe that we should keep our contact with him as indirect as possible ....

I think ... that he takes it for granted that we will take into account his present services when judging his past activities. Furthermore, I believe that he hopes that he and his associates will be able to playa political role in the future Austria as a result of his present activities. To make our position clear on these points, I told him that no man need fear for his security, provided he was not guilty of any war crime .. . [27]

Dulles agreed that "this type of source requires utmost caution." [28] After meeting several times with Leslie during his trip to Switzerland in the second week of April, Hottl (now code named "Alperg") was told -- based on his own offer -- to proceed to the Alpine Redoubt and from there, via wireless transmitter, to send information to the Americans through the Swiss military police on German war potential and to make suggestions for Allied propaganda. [29] Unbeknown to the OSS, the Gold Train arrived within the borders of the planned redoubt on April 8. [30] Hottl did not tell them. Dulles assumed only that Hottl wished to avoid prosecution: "Hoettl's record as [an] SD man and collaborator [of] Kaltenbrunner is of course bad," reported Dulles on April 21, "but I believe he desires to save his skin and therefore may be useful." [31]

Events outstripped Hottl's viability with the OSS as well as his hope to use the redoubt to hide the stolen Jewish loot. On April 27, Social Democrat Karl Renner proclaimed an independent Austria in Soviet-occupied Vienna with a left-leaning coalition government. [32] On April 29, Karl Wolff's representatives signed the secret "Sunrise" surrender at Caserta, which went into effect on May 2. [33] Hottl worked on a "legitimate Austrian government" to present to the Allies in opposition to that of Renner, while Kaltenbrunner worked on the redoubt, but all to no avai. [34] Hottl finally informed Leslie about the Gold Train in the redoubt area. [35] But he was making plans to hide a share for himself Colonel Toldi had already placed the Gold Train's most valuable gold and jewelry in numerous crates, which he was trying to remove from the train and hide. Hottl met with Toldi at Feldkirch on April 29 and struck a deal whereby Hottl and Westen would transport the crates into Switzerland (which Toldi had been unable to do) in return for 10 percent of the valuables. [36]

SECRET

CONCLUSIONS

April 17, 1945

1. I believe that in their different ways both H. and W. are important contacts, well worth developing.

H. is, of course, dangerous. He is a Nazi and an admitted associate of such men as Glaise-Horstenau and Meindl. He is a fanatical anti-Russian and, for this reason, we can not very well collaborate with him -- at least not without informing the Russians. But I see no reason why we should not use him in the furtherance of interests common both to the United Nations and to him and his associates, namely, the hastening of the end of resistance in Austria by the disruption of the Reduit. I feel that we should make full use of the Nachrichtendienst which he is organizing, of the propaganda services which he is setting up, and of the material which he can supply for this propaganda. I fully concur with him that psychological warfare must play a tremendously important role in combatting the Reduit. Further, I feel that we should encourage him in his attempts to create opposition groups within the Reduit. Although it is impossible to have any real sympathy for a man of his type, he nevertheless made a favourable impression on me. I believe he is sincere and to be trusted, provided we give him a certain measure of confidence. There is considerable evidence of his good will in his rescuing of such men as Seitz and Messner, and in his bringing out a man like W. There is also W.'s opinion of him, and G.'s trust of him as reported by W.

To avoid any accusation that we are working with a Nazi reactionary and a fanatical anti-Russian, I believe that we should keep our contact with him as indirect as possible. A., L., and possibly Grimm should be the people to deal with him, if and when he comes out again (and he expects to do so very shortly). I might possibly see him again but not alone and only in the capacity of an interested observer at his discussions with A. and Co. In such a capacity, I can always give him the encouragement he seeks without committing us in any way to any direct form of collaboration.

In this connection, it is amusing that H. told me that upon his return to Germany, he would have to show his Nazi masters something for his visit here. He stated that he would like to say that he had managed to obtain contacts with the Americans and had discovered from them that their divergencies with the Russians were very real. I told him that if he made any such reports, there was no question of my ever seeing him again, nor I image, of any collaboration with the Austrian group here. A., who was present, fully confirmed this. H. then asked me if I could provide him with any material to pass on his Nazi masters -- something less harmful, such as reports of difficulties we were having with ...

the German

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CIA SPECIAL COLLECTIONS RELEASE IN FULL 2000

Page from a memorandum from an OSS officer to Allen Dulles, arguing that Hottl would be a valuable source despite his past [Leslie to 110 (Dulles), 17 Apr. 1945, NA, RG 263, Wilhelm Hottl Name File, vol. 1].

Believing he had saved his loot, Hottl hoped to save his skin. But on his final trip to Switzerland in the first week of May, the French military had advanced to the Swiss-Austrian border, so Hottl got only as far as Liechtenstein. He failed to set up a meeting he desired between Dulles and Kaltenbrunner. Left in the cold of defeat and having to hide from Hungarians in Austria who knew his murderous record, he turned himself in to the 3rd U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps at Kirchdorf, hoping through his OSS contacts to rebuild his position. [37]

With no cachet as a peacemaker, Hottl could count on no legal favors. He speedily worked to forge another type of relationship with the Americans. He explained his Nazi past by posing as a Catholic scholar who joined the Nazi Party in May 1938 from fear of Bolshevism. Heydrich ousted him from the SD, he said, because he was too friendly with Jews. Kaltenbrunner reinstated him, he said, because he was a fellow Austrian. Austria's future, Hottl told his American captors, lay in a strong alliance with the West against Communism. Hottl also offered something of value to the United States -- a "permanent" intelligence chain into southeastern Europe reaching into Budapest, Bucharest, and Zagreb, which he said had survived intact from the war. [38] "Hoettl claims," said his CIC interrogators, "that his is the only information net of Amt VI that has come out of the general disorganization attending Germany's defeat basically intact. He believes that all existing nets have been damaged beyond repair, but some of their lines could possibly be reactivated in the course of time."

When asked why the United States would want to employ such a former SD net in southeastern Europe, especially since the United States and USSR were allies, Hottl was matter of fact:

From my activities in the South-East, extending over years, I know that the American information services in that area are still in their formative phase and that, in some countries, there are none at all. On the other hand [I have] been able to ascertain from various sources that the British have a well-established ... information net, which, even during the German occupation, has never been fully destroyed, nor, most likely, will it be destroyed during the period of the Russian occupation. Inasmuch as the organization of an information [net] inside of Soviet Russia proper would meet with considerable difficulties, it appears logical ... to use the neighboring countries now occupied by Russia as a window into Soviet-Russia.

Hottl added that the SD Referat leaders in southeastern Europe were loyal to him and staunchly anti-Soviet. [39] As for himself, Hottl offered his services "unreservedly" and "altruistically," but above all, pragmatically:

The USA cannot run its intelligence service in Germany ... only with former opponents of the National Socialist Regime ... In their own interest, the USA will also have to use former adherents of National Socialism ... Through the death of our Fuehrer and Reichsfuehrer SS, we are released from our oath as SS men ... I believe that I can be of considerable benefit to the interests of the USA ... more help than if my experience ... against the Soviet Union would be left unused in an internment camp ....

For this reason I have voluntarily reported to the U.S. Army ... on my own accord, without making use of the possibility of disappearing, confident that as an honorable officer, who has never acted against the principles of international law and morals, I will be treated honorably. [40]

Continued interrogation of Hottl on his trips to Switzerland and his southeastern European net brought the same story. Hottl claimed numerous contacts with the moderate left in Austria, whom, he said, agreed with Hottl on the need for an independent and now democratic Austria. He also said that he had a wireless station in the village of Steyrling that had been designed to feed information to the Allies on the redoubt and Werwolf, the plans for which, he continued to argue, were fully developed. [41]

The OSS and the CIC assessed Hottl as someone whose dedication to Nazism was transformed into the postwar aim of splitting the East-West alliance. So despite the Army's conclusion that Hottl was "one of the most intelligent SD functionaries in the field of foreign affairs," [42] it was also true that his motives, whatever they were,

cannot necessarily be differentiated from the long standing German wish to see the Western Allies embroiled with Russia, an embroilment which could not help but to restore some of Germany's lost power. To obscure this, Hottl would have us believe that he has long been politically suspect in Germany; to ingratiate himself, he claims as well to have been partially instrumental in securing the surrender of the southern German armies who were to have defended the Redoubt. [43]

Hottl's former associates were interrogated to ascertain his bona fides. In Germany, his former secretary Hildegard Beetz was questioned and even sent to meet Hottl (their conversation was recorded) "to find out ... what he considers the purpose of his present collaboration with us, and what his plans are for the future of Germany and himself" Correspondence between Hottl and Beetz suggested that Hottl planned to work for the United States, but Beetz warned her U.S. Army interrogators that Hottl "is not a man to be completely trusted." Her interrogators came away with the clear sense that "if we saw to use him we should beware of his retaining connections with the underground ... that she had on several occasions heard from RSHA officials ... discussing post defeat plans such as [using] the American service as a cover for their own operations." [44] Beetz, said OSS in July 1945, "suggested the likelihood of Hottl playing a double game." [45]

Hottl's former intelligence associates had little good to say, either. Willy Goetz, a former Abwehr officer in Budapest, charged that Hottl had threatened in April 1941 to report him for having a Jewish mistress if Goetz refused to spy for the SD against the Abwehr and supply Hottl (then in Vienna) with political reports from Hungary. [46]

The negative information was too much for the OSS. United States authorities quickly located and activated Hottl's wireless transmitter station in Steytling in early July. Masking their identity, they contacted Hottl's agents in Budapest and Bucharest, who reported from both cities. U.S. officials soon suspended these operations "due to necessity of consulting Russian authorities" because "careful exploitation of existing facilities should prove of great value to completely eliminate the organization." [47] By late July, the OSS (with Dulles' help) had contacted the Soviets to roll up the Hottl network. Officials from the U.S. zone of Germany commented that the Hottl case "is probably [the] most important one in [the] European theater because of its many implications of liaison with Russian intelligence." [48] Far from dividing the Americans and Soviets, Hottl spawned rare intelligence cooperation.

Records in Hottl's U.S. Army Counterintelligence file shows that in August 1945 the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War Department had expressed certain "misgivings" about him. [49] At best, he could be used as a witness for the Nuremberg trials of the major war criminals, one of which was to be Kaltenbrunner. [50] His most notable statement there concerned the numbers of Jews killed by the Nazis. Eichmann, Hottl claimed, had made the estimate of six million in the summer of 1944 -- a round number that remained fixed in the public imagination while seemingly cementing Hottl's supposed value as a witness. [51] But the fact that Hottl was released for such tasks at Nuremberg was proof that though he might be allowed to save his life, the United Stares had little use for him in the intelligence field. He would not return to Austria until October 1947.

Hottl and Army Counterintelligence

After Hottl was of no further use at Nuremberg, the U.S. Army transferred him to Upper Austria in October 1947. In Klessheim prison camp in Salzburg he awaited his trial before the Austrian People's Court in Vienna. But even in Klessheim, Hottl ingratiated himself with the CIC, convincing the CIC office in Gmunden and particularly the Chief for Upper Austria, Thomas A. Lucid, that he was a valuable intelligence operative.

Uninformed and under-motivated, Lucid took everything Hottl said at face value, thinking that Hottl's past as a former SD officer was a great advantage. "During the past twelve months that Hoettl has been in contact with this office," Lucid would later write,

he has proven to be an excellent source for ideas, both concrete and theoretical, on the expansion of American intelligence in Austria. His background as a former Deputy Chief of Amt VI RSHA for southeast Europe enables him to evaluate incoming reports on the Soviets with fairly complete accuracy. [52]

As a result, the Army released Hottl from Klessheim in December 1947 and agreed not to bind him over to the People's Court provided that Hottl kept Army Intelligence appraised of his activities. As of July 1948, however, he had not done SD. [53] Instead, taking advantage of the Central European tensions triggered by the Berlin Blockade, Hottl created a new intelligence net in southeastern Europe in order to offer his service to the U.S. authorities "at a price." According to those who knew him, Hottl was contacting former SD and other former intelligence operatives, including one who now worked for the Gehlen Organization in Western Germany, who told the U.S. authorities that Hottl was already telling prospective agents that he was working for the Americans and that he had high contacts within the Republican Party. [54]

Two nets created by Hottl were approved and activated that year by the CIC. In July, Lucid activated a net code named "Montgomery," which Hottl constructed to penetrate Hungary and obtain military information. Montgomery's agents included Austrians and Hungarian refugees living in Austria. Lucid predicted that Montgomery would be "very fruitful" and that it would soon represent the CIC's "central effort" at garnering intelligence in Hungary, Romania, and the Ukraine. [55] In October, "Mount Vernon," Hottl's second approved net, was activated at an initial cost of 25,000 Austrian schillings per year (it eventually cost more than 33,000 schillings) and aimed at the Soviet occupation zone of Austria. Hottl's thirteen major contacts in the Soviet zone included a lawyer, a chief engineer, a wholesaler, an oil foreman, a railroad official, and even a well-placed Communist, and as of May 1949 there would be four wireless sets in the Soviet zone. [56] "It is felt," said Lucid, echoing his prediction for Montgomery, "that this will make a very fruitful net ... " [57] Sub-sources were said to have included a secretary in the Cominform's Vienna Branch and an interpreter at Soviet Army headquarters at Baden bei Wien. [58]

The moment Lucid's superiors in Army Counterintelligence and CIA operatives in Austria learned that Hottl was in U.S. employ, warnings emerged complete with the recognition that Hottl's background presented moral as well as operational problems. An unsigned memo to Lieutenant Colonel James Berry, the Commanding Officer of the United States Forces in Austria, warned that

it is well known that [Hottl] was not one of the few decent representatives of the former SD ... Knowing Hottl's past, his own dubious character as well as of his co-workers and the most questionable political intrigues of Hottl and his circle ... warning must be given ....

Should it eventually become known that Hottl is being used by the Americans, this would be incomprehensible to all decent Germans and Austrians. [59]

The warning should have been heeded, for there were many things wrong with Montgomery and Mount Vernon. First, Hottl's finances seemed illegitimate. Circumstantial evidence (which later would be the stuff of legend) suggested that Hottl financed himself through a large cache of RSHA-controlled stolen foreign currency, which he had hidden in Switzerland at the end of the war at Kaltenbrunner's behest. "Very few people know," said one U.S. notation on a French request to interrogate Hottl in early 1948, "that Hoettl was responsible for the transfer of Kaltenbrunner's assets into Switzerland. [60] Iris Scheidler, wife of Kaltenbrunner's former adjutant Arthur Scheidler, told U.S. authorities that Hottl had "a seemingly unlimited supply of money." [61] Further sources included Kaltenbrunner's widow, who said that before her husband's execution he had told her that Hottl would care for her financially, as would Friedrich Westen, who admitted to having the conduit through which the assets were transferred to that country. The Austrian Police in Linz pursued the case without success in 1949. [62] So did French military intelligence in Austria, which interrogated Hottl on several occasions in September and October with regard to the missing crates of Jewish treasure from Hungary. While everyone speculated, Hottl embezzled large amounts of money provided by the CIC earmarked for his own agents. [63]

Karoly Ney

Meanwhile, Hottl's Montgomery and Mount Vernon subordinates were as compromised as Hottl. Most notorious was Montgomery's first Operations Chief, Karoly Ney. A Hungarian of German descent, Ney was an artillery officer in the Hungarian Army until 1943. In 1944, he became an SS officer owing to his services to Hottl and Obergruppenfuhrer Otto Winckelmann, the Highest SS and Police Leader in Budapest. In September 1944, under the supervision of Otto Skorzeny, Ney formed the SS Kampfgruppe Ney, a collection of German and Hungarian SS units "whose job was the liquidation of Jews, defeatists, saboteurs, and others inside Hungary." [64] In 1946, Ney was sentenced to life in prison by the U.S. military tribunal in Salzburg for the execution of five U.S. fliers by his Kampfgruppe at Bor. Three of his co-defendants were hanged, but Ney was soon pardoned and released from prison at the behest of the CIC in upper Austria. Three years later, senior officials remarked,

The circumstances under which Ney was released from American custody months after his life-sentence was imposed, are greatly puzzling in view of the fact that a crucial Hungarian witness arrived in Salzburg three days after the trial of Ney and company ... with enough damaging eyewitness testimony of Ney's role in the execution of the fliers to have sent him to the gallows ... A persistent but unconfirmed report circulating in 1947 among American military intelligence circles in Austria indicated that Ney was quietly released upon high-level intervention from the United States, and that Vatican contacts had much to do with his release. [65]

Ney had been in discreet contact with the CIC in 1947. In Munich by May 1948, Ney claimed to be at the head of a CIC project to re-establish a partisan underground in Hungary. [66] By the summer of that year, Hottl recruited Ney for the Montgomery net. Ney always had his own agenda. As the head of the Hungarian Union of Veterans of the War against the Soviet Union, Ney used intelligence jobs to raise money for his project of leading an underground anti-Communist group in Hungary. While working for Hottl and the CIC, Ney strove to be financially independent of both. Evidence emerged that Ney, while part of Montgomery, ran Hungarian agents for French intelligence, and that he had twice met the French military governor in Germany, General Pierre Koenig. [67] He was dropped from Montgomery for what was euphemistically labeled "operational incompetence," but he continued to work for French intelligence while trying to find and recruit former members of his Kampfgruppe. [68]

Erich Kernmayer

Erich Kernmayer was another dubious Montgomery operative. Like Hottl, he was a member of the illegal Austrian Nazi Party as early as 1934, after which he joined the illegal SA in 1935 and became the editor of the Nazi Party's Oesterreichischer Beobachter as well as the editor for a number of formerly Jewish-owned newspapers after the Anschluss. In 1941 he joined the SS, directing propaganda against Tito and eventually serving as an assistant to Otto Skorzeny in Budapest. Captured by the Americans, he served as an informant to CIC Salzburg until he joined Montgomery at its inception. Within Montgomery, Kernmayer was Ney's press chief, writing propaganda on Hungary for the Austrian press. Kernmayer became operational head of Montgomery after Ney was fired. [69]

Karl Kowarik

Mount Vernon's operations chief was no better. Karl Kowarik was another Viennese who joined the Nazi Party in 1930. He once proclaimed proudly that his father was a devoted follower of the famous Austrian anti-Semite Georg von Schonerer. [70] Kowarek became the Hitler Youth leader for Vienna in 1934, fled to Germany under Austrian police threats, and then returned a year later to run the entire illegal Hitler Youth in Austria. In April 1939, Kowarek was made an SS officer after his evaluation "as an old National Socialist of outspoken ideological conviction." [71] Now listed as a journalist in Mount Vernon, Kowarik spent much of his time contacting and financially supporting his former Hitler Youth subordinates. [72]

Finally, Hottl's intelligence circle dabbled openly in postwar Austrian politics. Hottl and Kernmayer formed the newspaper Alpenlandischer Heimatruf, aimed at former Nazis in Austria. [73] Hottl himself was a major participant at a secret meeting between high-ranking members of the Austrian People's Party and former Nazis in Gmunden on May 27, 1949, the object of which was to form a cooperative relationship in connection with the forthcoming elections. Hottl left the meeting with the assignment of disrupting the political activities of Dr. Albert Kraus, the Chief of the Association of Independents, who himself was the chief of four nets working for the CIC. [74] "We have warned him time and again," CIC Operations Chief Major J. V Milano later said, "that it is impossible for him to work as an intelligence operative and be mixed up with local politics." [75] And since either Hottl or Kraus could easily have exposed the other's activities, Lucid had to broker an atrangement between the two. [76] A CIA officer very familiar with Hottl was blunt. "If [Hottl is] slated for a political role in Austria," he said,

[it] would have to be viewed with grave concern ... Hottl is a born intriguer and dyed-in-the-wool Austrian Nazi with a veneer of "Wienerische Graziositat" ... He is bound to attract desparadoes [sic] of the type that surrounded Kaltenbrunner. Their political program [is] the re-establishment of Austrian ascendancy in the Balkans ... Yet I wouldn't rule out that Dr. Hottl, on purely opportunistic grounds, might decide to play ball with the Russians. [77]

Hottl might even then have been working for the Soviets. As early as January 1949, the CIC learned that Hottl had contacted a person from his university and wartime years, Dr. Tarias von Borodajkewycz, who was classified as a Nazi "offender" by the Austrian People's Court. Borodajkewycz was a researcher for the Moscow Academy of Sciences under a Soviet Colonel named Stern, who also served in the Austrian Communist Central Commirtee. [78] Borodajkewycz, it was later learned, also received Soviet funding for his business enterprises in western Austria. Following the Borodajkewycz lead, U.S. authorities also learned that Hottl "was in contact with Soviet intelligence" through at least four known Soviet penetration agents. The British would later be convinced that Hottl had given one of their agents over to the Soviets in 1952. And the CIC would eventually conclude that "part of the information [received from Hottl] was ... actual and deliberate deception aimed at misleading American intelligence." [79]

The CIC began to lose patience with Hottl and his networks in the spring of 1949, when Hottl insisted that his subordinates be protected from Austrian court proceedings. Dr. Hubert Hueber, a former Gestapo chief in Salzburg, was now, according to Hottl, "one of the best experts on the Communist movement in Western Austria." When the Austrian People's Court wanted to try Hueber for illegal membership in the NSDAP before 1938, Lucid atranged to have Hueber placed under CIC house arrest with his mother in Windischgarten, though he was to be available when his trial came up. Helmuth Hecke, another illegal Nazi who acted as Hottl's secretary for Mount Vernon, was less fortunate. Hottl's request that the CIC "get hold of [Hecke's] records at the People's Court at once and hold them for some time" ran aground. When Lucid asked a superior if the CIC could place him under a more benign house arrest, he received the blunt answer, "Nothing doing!" [80]

In the aggregate, Hottl's problems were too great for the CIC to retain him for long. After a high level meeting of officers within the 430th CIC Detachment in August 1949, both networks were soon dropped. "Hoettl," said Major Milano,

is considered an excellent intelligence man, but an extremely dangerous one. We have been requested many times by other U.S. intelligence agencies in Europe to discontinue our support of Hoettl since he was an SD leader and is feared by all present intelligence factions representing the Abwehr or non-German sources. The reason that he is feared is that he was an excellent intelligence man in his day and actually was a war criminal who was exonerated at Nuremberg due to the fact that he became a State's witness.

Despite Hottl's past, Milano conceded that it was Hottl's political maneuverings, his dishonesty with his CIC handlers, and the decline in the quality of his reports that had brought matters to a head. His reports over the past several months had been especially poor. The CIC did not believe that their intelligence on Austria and Hungary would suffer as a result of dropping Hottl and his networks. Surprisingly, the CIC did not fear that Hottl would work more for the Soviets. Milano reported, "We will watch Hoettl very closely ... " [81] Ever smooth, Hottl accepted his termination with grace, asking for a month of severance for both nets and commenting that "I shall continue my efforts for a mobilization against the Bolshevist world-enemy." [82] Many of Hottl's subordinates from Mount Vernon and Montgomery quickly offered their services to the CIC for a third of their earlier pay. [83]

Hottl, West German Intelligence, and the CIA

In 1950, despite prohibitive costs, Hottl opened his own publishing house in Linz, Niebelungen Verlag. He had mentioned this project as a possible front for espionage activities while still working for the CIC. Everything about the press was irregular. Hottl's name appeared nowhere in the ownership or operation, and his wife, Elfriede, held legal power of attorney. [84] Niebelungen Press published Hottl's first book, Die geheime Front, under the pseudonym Walter Hagen, which brought Hottl a financial success (it was among the first to discuss German secret operations in World War II). The book was also an advertisement for Hottl, who could not resist reveali ng his identity. While mentioning nothing of German war crimes in Italy, Hungary, or anyplace else, the book exaggerated Hottl's "genius" as a political analyst and secret operative as well as his anti-Soviet and pro-Western credentials. He masterminded the plan to rescue Mussolini; his advice to leave Horthy in power in Hungary in October 1944 would have stabilized the Carpathian front against the Red Army (which in Hottl's version seems to have committed the only atrocities in Hungary); he had worked for a peace with the West since 1943 only to be thwarted by Hitler and Roosevelt; and his own contact with Dulles had saved Austria from a bloody military campaign and Communist takeover, thus ensuring the democratic transition and independent Austria that he supposedly favored all along. [85] Thanks in part to Hottl's success as an author, Niebelungen Press provided jobs for a number of Hottl's associates. The book's arguments -- and here we must remember that the self-serving memoirs of Hitler's followers were read and believed by a wide German public in the 1950s -- also might have helped to ensure his future employment with other intelligence groups. [86]

In 1950, Hottl was in contact with French intelligence through former SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Werner Gottsch, another SD official whom the French jailed in 1945 and then used for intelligence purposes. Through Gottsch, Hottl resold to French intelligence copies of reports that he had already sold to the CIC in 1949, even while the French were interrogating him on the hidden crates of Hungarian Jewish loot. French intelligence in Austria was impressed enough with Hottl to protect him from Russian criminal investigators in 1950 and to offer Hottl permanent employment through another French agent in Austria, Raimund Strangl, also a pre-1938 Austrian Nazi. [87] Strangl, it turned out, had himself been the source of many of Hottl's reports to the CIC, which Hottl rewrote and passed off as original. They had been based mostly on newspapers and un coded Hungarian radio broadcasts, which the Americans could hear themselves. [88]

Evidence was also plentiful of Hottl's contacts with Soviet agents, including Russian representatives in Vienna. The CIC thought that Hottl had been enlisted to establish a Soviet-controlled apparatus within West German intelligence. [89] Hottl indeed met frequently with Dr. Emmerich Offczarek, a former classmate at the University of Vienna who was the Gehlen Organization's most senior official in Austria. It is difficult to say what these meetings concerned, but Hottl came away angry, stating that Offczarek was one of the dumbest intelligence men in Central Europe. If Hottl had contacted Offczarek to procure a job with the Gehlen Organization, he failed. [90]

Hottl's main desire, however, was to work for West German intelligence in such a way that he would be invulnerable to the Americans, who had made clear their distrust. The partial sovereignty of West Germany in 1949 and the discussion of rearmament that followed the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 also opened the question in Bonn of who would head a new West German intelligence agency -- Reinhard Gehlen, whose organization had been officially under U.S. control, or someone else. In 1950, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer created the Zentrale fur Heimatdienst (ZfH), an umbrella organization of four detachments charged with national defense. The third branch of the ZfH was Information und Nachrichtendienst under Achim Oster, the son of Hans Oster, the Abwehr officer who was executed for his part in the 1944 plot to kill Hitler. The operative chief of the branch was another former Abwehr officer, Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, whose influence was such that the detachment became known as the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Heinz-Amt (FWHA). Charged with gathering intelligence from East Germany and the other Soviet satellites, it would build nets into Eastern Europe but would also have a presence in Italy and Austria.

The very existence of the FWHA was secret. Its administrative offices were outside of Bonn in Bad Godesberg, and only the Chancellor himself could determine how information gathered by the office would be used. In October 1950, the entire ZfH was placed under the so-called Amt Blank, which would become the official West German Ministry of Defense in 1955. [91] These developments had the full attention of Gehlen -- who hoped to remain the head of whatever intelligence service emerged from West German sovereignty -- and of Gehlen's sponsors in the CIA. Both were well informed about Heinz's activities. The CIA was in direct contact with Heinz, using a code name either for Heinz himself or for his office, and Gehlen would later penetrate the Heinz organization. [92]

The CIA was able to monitor Hottl through Army CIC Detachment 35 of United States Forces Austria. One of the CIC agents who provided a considerable amount of information on Hottl was Karl Theodor Haas, another former SD official. In 1951, the CIC and the CIA both learned that Hottl approached Haas to work for him in the Heinz office.9J The two met at Bad Ischl in January 1952. Hottl told Haas that he had been hired by Heinz to head the southeast section of the new German intelligence service, which, Hottl said, would be truly independent and not, like the Gehlen Organization, dependent on the United States. Hottl said that his own West German citizenship process was underway and that Haas, if he were to join, would work in Milan under a commercial cover as head of the Italian subsection. Hottl claimed to have found section chiefs for the other southeastern states as well. He introduced Haas to Baron Heinrich Mast, a disaffected Gehlen employee who was now Hottl's "Chief of Staff," and who would be fired by the Gehlen Organization for this reason in March 1952. [94] Haas told the CIC about the meeting, and also that he was tempted by Hottl's offer to become a German civil servant with a high monthly salary (Hottl promised 1,000 deutsche marks per month). [95]

CIC Detachment 35 showed concern because Hottl was "a definite security threat." His very presence in the Heinz's organization discredited that office in American eyes. [96] More cynical CIA officials toyed with leaving Hottl in place within the Amt Blank because "a well-documented case of [Heinz's] use of unacceptable RSHA types such as Hoettl could very well give us sufficient leverage to resolve any [Gehlen-Heinz] differences ... to our advantage." [97] But this assessment assumed that the Heinz office could firmly control Hottl; ultimately, the CIA placed little stock in this hope. The CIA expressed its concerns to Heinz in April 1952. Heinz told the CIA Chief in Frankfurt that though Hottl was "uncouth and characterless," and although much of his reportage was worthless, Hottl provided valuable political reports on Austria. These reports were then sent to Blank and distributed in the West German Chancellery itself Heinz said he had actually received a handwritten commendation from Adenauer for his reporting on the French and Austrian political scenes, the latter of which had originated with Hottl. [98] In the meantime, Hottl was trying to extend his net into Trieste, Slovakia, North Africa, and even the Vatican. [99]

By now, the CIA had learned that Hottl was employing the same sorts of men he used in Montgomery and Mount Vernon. One was former SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Rupert Mandl, who served the Nazi regime in Rome and Zagreb. Another was the infamous Otto von Bolschwing, who helped to engineer the failed Iron Guard coup in Romania in January 1941. [100] And Hottl's intelligence from the operations standpoint seemed just as suspect as it had in 1948. Several CIA operatives in Vienna commented that despite Adenauer's commendation, Hottl's analysis of Austrian politics was "distinguished more by its rhetoric than by its profundity." Despite Heinz's conviction that Hottl had a source within the Austrian government, CIA readers of his reports were struck by the low quality of information, which "does not require the talents of a very astute operator." Hottl, they noted, "can turn out a sizable volume of such information without interrupting his regular pattern of coffeehouse conversations." Any support for Hottl, they concluded, "is a Bad Thing." [101]

Hottl also had a corrosive effect in Austria, where in the summer of 1952, Major Victor Tuliszewski, the Commanding Officer of the U.S. Military Intelligence Service, paid 3,000 schillings for a sheaf of reports on the Soviet zone of Austria and Hungary, and then demanded reimbursement from the CIC. Both the CIA and the CIC identified the reports as coming from Hottl. Furious, the CIC insisted that the CIA tell Heinz to sever all contacts with Hottl. "If persuasion is not enough, and the Germans persist in using Hoettl," said Army Intelligence, "USFA is planning some unfavorable publicity for Hoettl and would not feel reluctant to mention his present connections with [the German government] along with elaboration of his past scurrilous record," which, they seemed to have momentarily forgotten, included a stint with the CIC.

The CIA agreed that "the elimination of Hoettl ... would be to the general good of intelligence in Austria." [102] Colonel Heinz, however, refused to cut off Hottl, possibly because anyone who could help earn him a handwritten commendation from Adenauer also bolstered his position against Gehlen. "[Heinz] is fully aware of Hoettl's reputation," reported the CIA, "but finds him a useful man." [103] The CIA said later, "I did not fail to point out to Heinz that his continued relations with Hoettl would in the end discredit the entire [West German Intelligence] office." [104] On October 2, 1952, Heinz finally relented, dropping Hottl for supplying false reports. Hottl protested to Heinz and then to Blank himself in November, arguing that it was the Americans who forced him back into retirement. Not until Hottl's home was searched in March the following year and his correspondence read was the CIA convinced that West German intelligence had really dropped Hottl. [105] A Soviet Agent? Hottl and the Ponger-Verber Affair

In January 1953, U.S. authorities in Vienna arrested two naturalized U.S. citizens living in that city -- Kurt Ponger and his brother-in-law, Walter Verber -- for Soviet espionage. Both men were Jewish natives of Vienna who had come to the United States in 1938 and soon after secretly joined the Communist Party of the United States. Because of their language skills, both had served U.S. intelligence during the war, and Ponger had worked as an interrogator at Nuremberg. Afterwards, they returned to Vienna where they lived in the Soviet municipal sector and established the Central European Press as a cover for espionage activity on behalf of the Soviet Union. The U.S. Army's 430th Counterintelligence Corps, based in Vienna, placed them under surveillance in 1949 and compiled more than two thousand top-secret reports on them. [106]

The CIA tracked a connection between the two Communist agents and Hottl. A Gehlen Organization section chief stated that in late October 1952 he had seen Hottl together with Ponger and Ponger's associate Walter Lauber on an auto trip through West Germany -- all four happened to stop at the same highway rest stop. During this West German trip, Hottl, Ponger, and Lauber separated for a time, and Hottl met with Wilhelm Krichbaum, the wartime head of the German Army's Geheime Feldpolizei and now a senior Gehlen official. Krichbaum later claimed that Hottl was asking all of his contacts in West Germany about the possibility of a job with the Gehlen Organization. [107] When the CIC arrested Lauber, they found a handwritten copy of Hottl's address book containing the names of numerous CIA and Gehlen operatives. [108] On April 14, Ponger, about to plead guilty to espionage, said that he had cultivated both Hottl and Krichbaum as penetration agents against the Gehlen Organization. [109] In 1963, the CIA discovered -- likely thanks to a West German investigation -- that Krichbaum had been working for the Soviets as early as 1950. [110] The fact that Hottl had contact with Ponger and Lauber opened up the possibility that, wittingly or unwittingly, he was being used as a Soviet penetration agent against West German intelligence.

The first challenge for the CIA was to assess the level of damage, which meant evaluating the nature of the connection between Hottl and the Gehlen Organization. Senior Gehlen officials emphatically denied an operative relationship with Hottl, and CIA liaisons with Gehlen believed these denials. "[We] have made such strong representation [at] all levels of Zipper [Gehlen Organization code name] [in the] last four months that they would not risk flaunting us especially since they knew we [were] well informed on Hoettl's dealings from other sources." [111] Others were less sure. On March 4, one CIA employee went over the case with Gehlen personally and charged his organization with "intentionally withholding information of vital interest." Gehlen's Austrian elements, said this CIA liaison, were once again a source of "considerable friction" between the CIA and the Gehlen Organization. [112] The only way to assess the nature of Hottl's connections would be through a full interrogation of Hottl, preferably by a CIC agent well acquainted with Austria but not compromised by the Montgomery or Mount Vernon fiascos.

Hottl conceded nothing in a CIC interrogation in February 1953. His contacts with Ponger, Verber, and Lauber, he suggested, were all about his journalistic projects and the procurement of photographs from Ponger's wartime collection. Ponger and Verber, Hottl said, probably had ties to Israeli intelligence, but they always had seemed anti-Communist to him. [113] The CIA was sure that Hottl was lying. After the CIA sent information on Ponger and Verber to Army Intelligence suggesting that Ponger and Verber had indeed tried to penetrate the Gehlen Organization through Hottl and that Ponger had tried hard to get Hottl employment with Gehlen, the Army agreed to re-arrest and re-interrogate Hottl.

This time, the interrogation would be less friendly because Hottl was "very adept at lying and evasion" and because the CIC now believed that Hottl was a witting agent of Ponger. They "strongly suspected" that Hottl also tried to use his contacts in the Gehlen Organization to assist Ponger in making contacts. Moreover, Hottl possessed records from Mount Vernon and Montgomery records that by now "could constitute a source of embarrassment to the Command and [which] should be retrieved." Hottl was therefore lured by CIC Special Agent Rolf Ringer to Salzburg, where he was arrested on March 25 and interrogated on March 26 and 28, and then, after being held in solitary confinement, again on April 3. The interrogations themselves filled seven reels of audiotape.

Hottl remained a tough nut to crack. "When faced ... with the two alternatives," said the preliminary interrogation report,

that he was a witting member of the Soviet-controlled [Ponger] complex or that he was a complete dope, Hoettl refused to accept either alternative. Being a proud man, he argued at length against the accusation that he must have been a fool to be taken in by Ponger and at the same time maintained that he never in any way tumbled to the true affiliations of the Verber-Ponger family although he was aware that the Pongers resided in [the] Soviet sector of Vienna. [114]

Instead, Hottl threw suspicion onto Krichbaum, stating that Ponger had used Krichbaum to get Hottl a job with Gehlen, but that Ponger never tried to recruit Hottl himself. Hottl said he did not think Krichbaum was a Soviet agent, but implied that it was a possibility. "This off-hand or indirect type of slander," reported the interrogator, was "characteristic of all Hoettl's remarks concerning previous colleagues." [115]

In the end, it was impossible to tell whether Hottl was a Soviet agent. Even Hottl's voluminous correspondence of more than thirty thousand pages, which was seized and partially microfilmed, offered no sure answers. Correspondence from Hottl to Baron Mast professed shock at the Ponger-Verber affair, while further implicating Krichbaum as one of Ponger's closest contacts. Hottl insisted in this correspondence that his own longstanding connections with Ponger were only in the journalistic field. This correspondence could itself have been a fabrication left conspicuously for the eventuality that Hottl was arrested. After all, once Ponger and Verber were arrested, Hottl could have concluded that his turn would come. The CIC feared that more incriminating correspondence could be hidden in another cache, which might also have included his Montgomery and Mount Vernon correspondence, none of which had been found. [116] But if Hottl's anti-Communist correspondence were a clever fabrication, it revealed traces of his Nazi colors. Ponger, he said in a letter to Rupert Mandl, "felt himself much more Jew than American," and that "this entire espionage case has been set up in certain Jewish circles in order ... to indicate how innocent these 'new Americans' ... are and how they have been persecuted." [117]

CIA evaluators gave Hottl the benefit of the doubt. One agent familiar with the case was:

inclined to offer odds of ten to nine, or perhaps twenty to nineteen, that Hoettl is not under Soviet control and was unaware that Ponger and Verber were Soviet agents. His function in the affair may have been to act as [an] unwitting red herring, so that if Ponger's travel in Western Austria and Germany should come to the attention of an anti-Soviet service, attention would be diverted to everybody's normal curiosity about Hoettl's activity. It is also conceivable that Ponger, who made a persistent attempt to build Hoettl into Zipper, was ... setting up an approach which was to be made at some later date ... after Hoetr! had begun to function as a Zipperite. [118]

For the moment, this was as close to the truth as anyone would get. After the second interrogation, the CIA concluded that "[Hottl] is determined to hold out under heavy pressure and appear ridiculous if necessary, rather than yield one inch of the story he has prepared. He does not really fear us, nor can he be readily intimidated by US." [119] In fact, Hottl spent his time in solitary confinement writing an article on Walter Schellenberg, which he would later try to sell to the German press. "I was Hitler's Master Spy," another Hottl article partially based on this work, was published later in the year. CIA analysts found the article more "amusing" than accurate. [120] Amazingly, during his captivity Hottl also offered to work for U.S. intelligence again as a double agent who would expose Ponger and Verber's Soviet contacts. "All readers of this report will be overwhelmed with relief," said the second interrogation report, "that the interrogator did not accept Hoettl's offer." [121]

The need to scotch Hottl's intelligence activities once and for all was handled in connection with his release during the second week of April. Two days before, a press release implicated Hottl in the Ponger-Verber affair. Such would "ensure that our version of the story would appear first, while making Hottl too suspect for use either by Gehlen or the Soviets." [122] Such did not dissuade agencies lured by Hottl's supposed expertise, however. Yugoslav intelligence tried in the summer and fall of 1953 to recruit Hottl for work in Trieste (presumably against the likes of Draganovic), and Hottl tried to get the backing of the Gehlen Organization for this project. Gehlen turned down the proposal, but agents within the organization maintained contact with Hottl well into the following year. "We have pointed out the disadvantage to Zipper of having so close a connection to the eternal Willi, but, naturally without avail." [123]

The real surprise came in the years to follow. A former KGB staff officer named Anatoly Golitsin who defected in 1961 and who carried a CIA code name, commented during debriefing in 1963 that Hottl had been a "Soviet agent of long standing," having worked as a KGB counterintelligence agent in Vienna. Another defector, Peter Deriabin, confirmed that Hottl operated under the Soviet code name "Cheka" and was "the highest paid [Russian intelligence] agent [Deriabin] knew of." [124] The possibility that Hottl was still an active Soviet agent did not appear to bother the CIA, however. "If Hoettl has ever been a highly paid Soviet agent," said one CIA Chief of Station, "then he managed to defraud the [Soviets] along with his other employers." [125]

By this time, Hottl had actually taken to defrauding his fellow citizens. As the headmaster of a private middle school in Alt Aussee, Hottl presided over a bankruptcy when the school went 15 million schillings in debt in February 1964 following a number of questionable building contracts. [126] Hottl landed on his feet. In 1955 he had published a second book (Hitler's Paper Weapon) concerning Operation Bernhard. [121] His expertise in this fascinating story landed him Austrian television appearances. This notoriety in turn helped to protect him when the Hungarian government demanded his extradition. Hottl, the Hungarians said, had helped to plan the occupation of Hungary, had been behind the arrest of Hungarian resistors, and had helped in the deportation of Hungary's Jews. The Hungarian demand was denied. In the following decades Hottl continued to pose as an intelligence expert uncompromised by his Nazi career or his connections with Communists. As a parting shot, in 1997 he published self-serving memoirs under his own name. [128] He died two years later.

Hottl's career is valuable in supplementing our understanding of the relationship between Allied intelligence and the Nazis in the early postwar years. Knowledgeable people -- including Germans who had served Hitler -- tempted some U.S. intelligence officials, who overlooked Nazi pasts if the individuals seemed especially valuable. We will never know whether it was Hottl's shameful record as an SS officer or his fundamental dishonesty as a swindler and security risk that hurt him more in Americans eyes. It appears that if Hottl had shown more candor and supplied better intelligence, his U.S. patrons might have continued to protect him, despite their awareness of the risks posed by his Nazi past. There were those in the CIA, after all, who hoped to use Hottl's SS past as a political lever in the West German intelligence struggle.

Many postwar intelligence agencies were tempted by Hottl's smoothness at one time or another, but only the least competent and most vulnerable succumbed. The OSS was willing to keep a channel open to Hottl if such a channel could weaken the Alpine Redoubt, but once the war was over, Hottl's lines to the East were shut down. Three years later, East-West tensions had reached the point that local CIC officials in Upper Austria were willing to clutch at any straw to provide additional security for the western Austrian zones. Even then, those Army and CIA officers familiar with Hottl's background demonstrated moral misgivings over his use, though Hottl's dubious contacts and financial/political shenanigans brought about his termination. How Hottl found employment in the Amt Blank awaits the opening of German intelligence records. For now we can assume that his Austrian reports impressed someone in Bonn enough to provide Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz with some leverage against his political opponents. The CIA and the CIC saw Hottl as a moral as well as an operational risk to the new West German state. Ultimately, however, it took Hottl's association with the Soviets, rather than with the Nazis, to ruin his cachet in the Western intelligence world for good.

10. In his SS file, Hottl's exact role is unclear. His own version is discussed in his memoir, The Secret Front: Nazi Political Espionage 1938-1945, trans. R. H. Stevens (New York: Praeger, 1954), chapters 13-15.

13. Zweig, The Gold Train, 39-42. Kaltenbrunner said after the war that his best information on Hungary came from Hottl, who remained in Budapest as the chief SD intelligence man and was political adviser to Edmund Vessenmayer, the Reich Plenipotentiary in Hungary. CI War Room incoming telegram, Ref. 410, 25 May 1945, NA, RG 226, entry 119A, box 55, folder 1602; War Room incoming telegram, Ref. 413, sent 26 May 1945, ibid. Black, Kaltenbrunner, 228.

14. In postwar interrogations Hottl falsely claimed to have developed contacts with moderate Austrians and to have floated peace feelers to the West since 1943. Black, Kaltenbrunner, 223ff.

23. This is based on a comment from Dulles. See Petersen, Hitler's Doorstep, document 5-75. For Donovan, see Donovan to Secretary of State, unnumbered, 24 Mar. 1945, NA, RG 263, Wilhelm Hottl Name File, vol. 1.

24. Donovan to Secretary of State, 24 Mar. 1945, NA, RG 263, Wilhelm Hottl Name File, vol. 1, again based on Dulles's report of the same day. See Petersen, Hitler's Doorstep, document 5-75.

32. Gunther Bischof, Austria in the First Cold War, 1945-1955: The Leverage of the Weak (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999).

33. Smith and Agarossi, Operation Sunrise, 155-57.

34. Black, Kaltenbrunner, 247-50.

35. Zweig, Gold Train, 95.

36. Ibid., 112-17, 124-25. Westen seems to have hidden the crates in Switzerland, but they vanished soon after and were never recovered. Westen died in June 1951 after a bizarre incident in which he tried to prove the corruptibility of Austrian policemen. Hottl, it was reported, subsequently suffered a breakdown owing to the fact that he had not been able to locate the stolen Jewish assets that they had taken together; ibid., 210.

80. Hottl note of 23 Mat. 1949, NA, RG 263, Wilhelm Hottl Name File, vol. 9. Hottl note to Lucid and Morrison, 23 Mar. 1949, ibid., and attached notes. Hecke received a sentence of one year in prison and confiscation of all property.

92. The penetration was through Gerhard Schacht, a Gehlen section leader who had given the appearance of having defected to Heinz's group. It was through this connection in early 1952 that Gehlen and then the CIA re-learned that Heinz had employed Hottl for its Austrian and Italian reporting. CIA Pullach Operations Branch to Special Operations, 9 Jan. 1952, NA, RG 263, Wilhelm Hottl Name File, vol. 3; CIA Chief [excised] to Chief [excised], No. [excised], 10 Jan. 1952, ibid., vol. 4.

104. Chief [excised] to Chief [excised], No. [excised], 29 Sept. 1952, ibid. By mid-summer 1952, when Heinz's organization was incorporated into the Gehlen Organization with Heinz as a section Chief, Hottl was maintained as an operative for southeast Europe. Gehlen told CIA contacts that the OM 50,000 that Heinz's group received from Bonn was actually supplemented by the British government thanks to the expenses inherent in Hottl's operations in Italy, North Africa, and southeast Europe. Note from Salzburg for Hottl File, [excised], 14 July 1952, ibid.

Om THE MOST RENOWNED Soviet spy network in World War II, the Red Orchestra, offer vital clues to understanding Soviet espionage in the postwar period? The FBI, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC), and the CIA, as well as British, French, and West German intelligence were all convinced that the answer was yes. Nazi Germany's Gestapo had gathered a great deal of information about the Red Orchestra, which put former Gestapo officials in the position of perceived experts who were ready to serve new masters in the postwar milieu. FBI, Army, and CIA documents newly declassified by the IWG reveal how a number of war criminals managed to get recRuited by intelligence agencies and how they failed in their new capacity, for they never knew as much as they claimed to know about the Red Orchestra.

"Red Orchestra" (Rote Kapelle) was a Gestapo term describing Soviet espionage networks in Western Europe directed by Red Army Intelligence (Glavonoye Rasvodyvatelnoye Upravalenie, or GRU). [1] In Berlin, the Soviets depended on information from well-placed officials in the German government. Harto Schulze- Boysen, the grand nephew of Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, headed one net from within the German Air Ministry. Arvid Harnack, the scion of a famous academic family and a senior official in the Reich Ministry of Economics, headed another net. Both networks were diverse collections of espionage amateurs-academics, artists, and writers united by leftist sympathies and antipathy to Nazism. [2]

Professional Soviet agents ran the Western European networks. Leopold Trepper, a Polish Jew trained in Moscow, arrived in France in December 1936 as a technical adviser for Soviet nets in Western Europe and Scandinavia. With Leon Grossvogel, a Jewish businessman with Communist sympathies, Trepper soon created a cover firm known as Le Foreign Excelente Reincote (The Foreign Excellent Raincoat Company) in Brussels. The firm exported rainwear and served as cover for espionage activities in several countries.

The term "Red Orchestra" implies that the Soviet nets operated as a whole, but in fact the Red Orchestra comprised smaller networks that were designed to remain watertight so that penetration of one would not lead to the betrayal of all. Its operations had flaws, however, and in 1941 the Gestapo began to dismantle the network in Berlin and elsewhere in Europe.

The Gestapo's Berlin investigations of the Red Orchestra were conducted by the Sonderkommission Rote Kapelle, a Gestapo detachment headed by Obersturmbannflihrer Friedrich Panzinger, head of the Gestapo department focused on Communism and Marxism. The Commission's daily work was headed by Panzinger's subordinate, Kriminalrat Horst Kopkow, head of Gestapo-Sabotage and a former Nazi brawler who had joined the SS in 1932 and the Gestapo in 1934. Kopkow personally arrested leading Red Orchestra personalities, including Harto Schulze-Boysen, and sanctioned torture to learn Names of other Soviet agents. [3] By the end of October 1942, 119 people had been arrested in Germany, 77 to be tried in nineteen separate secret proceedings before the Reich Court- Martial from December 1942 to July 1943. [4] It appeared that Nazi Germany's police and judicial machinery had neutralized this mortal threat.

Following arrests of other Red Orchestra agents in Western Europe, the aim of the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle was to "play back" captured agents against Moscow. The GRU would continue to receive information-some genuine, most not-in hopes that the Gestapo would learn more about Communist cells and Soviet espionage in Western Europe while sending the Soviets damaging disinformation. By November 1942, the Gestapo played back the agents captured in the low countries, where four wireless beams communicated with Moscow. [5]

But was the Red Orchestra really dead? From 1945 to 1949, British countertintelligence (MI-5) studied the Red Orchestra more systematically than any other agency. [6] In all, MI-5 composed three lengthy reports on the Red Orchestra: a preliminary report in April 1946, the second draft in November 1946, and the final report with appendices in 1949. [7]

Even the preliminary report frightened all who read it. MI-5 deduced that

it is clear that the Russian organizations concerned were not ... a wartime creation, but derived directly from the Russians' pre-war network in Europe. There is evidence that up till 1940 or even 1941 this network ... was working not against Germany but against this country [England] and perhaps also against the USA. [8]

Sources for the report included Nazis such as Horst Kopkow, whom the British captured in May 1945. [9] An important non-Nazi source was Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk for the Soviet military attache in Canada. In September 1945, Gouzenko defected from the Soviet embassy in Ottawa with records on GRU activities.

Gouzenko's records revealed Red Orchestra financial links running through New York to the Red Three (Rote Drei), a Soviet espionage network in Switzerland. [10] During the war, GRU operations in Switzerland were headed by Alexander Rado, a Hungarian (code Named "Dora"). [11] Rado used three radio operators after 1941: Alexander Foote, a British adventurer; and two native Swiss, Marguerite Bolli and Edmond HNamel. [12] But Rachel Duebendorfer (code Named "Sissy"), a Polish Jew who joined Rado in 1941, was the key to Rado's nets. [13] Her prized source was Rudolf Roessler (code Named "Lucy"). [14] Roessler had access to high-quality German military intelligence, which he forwarded to Duebendorfer through Swiss cutout Christian Schneider (code Named "Taylor"). Duebendorfer passed it to Rado for transmission by Foote. Duebendorfer never divulged Lucy's identity even to her superiors, despite Moscow's irritation. [15] The Swiss Federal Police disrupted the Rote Drei for a time with the arrests of HNamel, Bolli, and Foote in October and November 1943 (Rado fled the country). [16] But the Germans could never destroy GRU operations in Switzerland. It thus remains the least understood of the Soviet nets.

In May 1945, Hans von Pescatore, an Abwehr and later SD Foreign Police official in Switzerland, was arrested by Swiss Federal Police for espionage and then smuggled into Italy on the request of Allen Dulles, head of the OSS mission in Bern. Pescatore had told the British that the Red Orchestra's Duebendorfer net could become active again. Hence, the FBI becName interested in the Rote Drei.

The FBI and the Search for Spies in the United States

MI-5 concluded by 1949 that Rudolf Roessler, unlike most Soviet agents, was a true mercenary: he demanded thousands of Swiss francs per month with cash on delivery. His information cost between SF 33,000 and SF 48,000 over the course of his service. [17] Moscow's insistence that the link to Lucy be maintained, combined with Duebendorfer's refusal to reveal his identity, meant Duebendorfer was constantly short of money to pay Roessler. [18] The British and Americans were aware in 1946 of financial links that kept Soviet espionage afloat in Switzerland, but the details were murky because they had never been clear to the Germans, on whose information they relied. "Moscow," Pescatore said, "found numerous technical difficulties in getting money to Switzerland, and suggested various ways to Rado ... Large sums did come from the U.S.A., though how they cName remained a mystery." [19]

Financial links from North America to Switzerland were partially revealed during the Gouzenko case, and the FBI followed them up. Germina Rabinowitz, a Lithuanian Jew with a doctorate from the University of Heidelberg, had worked in the International Labor Office (ILO) -- an organization with diplomatic immunity-in Geneva from 1929 to 1940. She knew Duebendorfer (who had also worked for the ILO) in Geneva before moving to the ILO in Montreal from 1941 to 1944. Duebendorfer contacted Rabinowitz via the ILO mail pouch in November 1943 and again in April 1944 asking for money. [20] Rabinowitz contacted the Soviet embassy in Ottawa to secure funds. Military attache Nikolai Zabotin provided $10,000. [21] Rabinowitz transferred the money through the Helbros Watch Company of New York, whose director, William Helbein, was a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Russia. During the war, Helbros was a buyer of Swiss watches for American forces and could "transfer without mention almost unlimited sums of money to Switzerland," despite U.S. regulations. Helbein also had contacts in Switzerland through his sister-in-law Berthe Helbein, another Russian emigre. Berthe was a friend of Duebendorfer, and, according to Swiss authorities, a Soviet agent herself. [22]

The Central Intelligence Group (CIG), the immediate predecessor of the CIA, was given access to MI-5 reports on the Red Orchestra. CIG feared the Soviets had used Helbros to transfer money throughout the war; now Helbein "may be coerced by the Russians into additional espionage activity ... " [23] FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was not yet convinced. "The only information we have," he said, was the "deposit of $10,000 to ... Duebendorfer in Geneva." [24] Helbein was interviewed by FBI agents in New York in 1946 and again in 1947, but they learned nothing substantive. [25]

The following year, the FBI acquired information on Berthe Helbein from CIG, which described her as "a disagreeable woman with some very expensive jewelry." [26] Claiming that she thought she was helping a Soviet relief organization, Berthe Helbein loaned Duebendorfer nearly SF 10,000 during 1943. On November 3, 1944, she gave Duebendorfer SF 28,500, which was the equivalent of $10,000 minus the money loaned to Duebendorfer in 1943. The existence of the $10,000 in New York was revealed to her by William Helbein, then in Lisbon. [27]

Duebendorfer's letters to Rabinowitz, as well as the $10,000 money transfer to Switzerland, both went through a cutout Named Alexander Abramson (code Named "Sascha"), a Lithuanian Jew and ILO employee in Geneva. [28] In 1946, the British and FBI knew little about Abramson thanks to his ILO diplomatic status, but he was clearly connected with Swiss Communists. Swiss police thought he was the chief Soviet agent in Switzerland after the war. [29] When Abramson left the ILO in 1947, Swiss police interrogated him and the information made its way to the FBI. Abramson admitted to being Germina Rabinowitz's cousin and to being Duebendorfer's friend. He admitted sending Duebendorfer's letters to Rabinowitz through the ILO pouch because Duebendorfer had told him that the money requested was for Soviet paws. The Swiss police, unconvinced by Abramson's insistence that he consciously did no work for Soviet intelligence, argued that "he is without doubt deeply implicated in the whole affair." [30] Abramson moved to Paris before implicating himself further. [31]

The FBI ran down all leads in New York provided by the CIA and MI-5. [32] The British interrogation of Foote in 1947 and an examination of Foote's personal notebook revealed an earlier financial connection between RKO Radio Films representatives and the Soviet network in Geneva. The president of RKO film distribution in Geneva was Armand Palivoda, a Polish Jew who had been in Switzerland since 1907. MI-5 and the CIA believed by 1947 that Palivoda was an active Soviet agent because "his financial status appears too good to be entirely brought about by his job." [33] Foote's written materials noted a $4,000 deposit into the RKO Swiss branch account in the Irving Trust Bank in New York in July 1941, whereupon Palivoda handed over the equivalent sum in Swiss francs to an intermediary of Foote's. Foote claimed that these transactions via RKO representatives occurred into 1943. [34] In 1948, when Palivoda applied for a U.S. visa, the CIA and FBI agreed that he was a security risk who would not be admitted into the country. [35]

Nothing more was learned about a Red Orchestra presence in the United States. But the FBI maintained a close watch on anyone in the United States who had any connection, familial or otherwise, with Soviet wartime networks in Europe. Marguerite Barcza's family is a case in point. Barcza herself was a Jewish Czech refugee who becName the wartime mistress to Anatoli Gurevitch, a top Red Orchestra operative in Brussels and then Marseilles. Barcza's mother, Else Singer, and her brother, Bederich Singer, were both Jewish refugees who cName to the United States and resided in New York before and after the war, respectively. Barzca's mother received a gift of $100 during the war through Gurevitch, which the FBI followed up as far as it could before closing the file. The FBI kept a file into the 1950s on Bederich Singer, whom the British thought had been part of the Gurevitch network in France. [36] Marguerite Barcza was not allowed into the United States when she applied for a visa in 1947, though the CIA searched her room in Brussels and found nothing incriminating. [37]

Other Jewish refugees connected with the Soviet networks were also watched closely. Two of the three Jewish directors of the Belgian rainwear firm Au Roi de Caoutchouc, who were also financial partners in Leon Grossvogel's Le Foreign Excelente Reincote, had come to the United States as refugees in 1941. They were Abraham Lerner and Maurice Padawer, both originally Polish Jews. Once it was learned that Grossvogel, their one-time partner in Brussels, was to have come to the United States in the interest of Soviet espionage, the FBI checked both men and placed them under surveillance.

The FBI remained vigilant even after receiving the final MI-5 report on the Red Orchestra in 1949. "[There] are at the present time," said Hoover,

a number of persons residing in [he United States who were either involved in espionage activities in Europe in the Rote Kapelle or Rote Drei espionage networks, or were closely associated with or are relatives of individuals who so operated ... [T]he information thus far obtained has not resulted in determining whether the individuals residing in the United States are presently active as espionage agents or assisting ... in gathering data for foreign principles. [38]

Such scrutiny with known and suspected Soviet agents is understandable. With information from decrypts and other sources, by 1949 the FBI had helped to uncover a number of Soviet spies in the United States. Most of these spies, however, were American Communists who, like Alger Hiss, spied for the Soviets out of misguided idealism. [39] Wartime Jewish refugees who fought against Nazism before the United States entered the war would seem to be in another category, especially since those investigated by the FBI had only the loosest of ties with Soviet wartime intelligence in Europe.

The CIC and the Red Orchestra: Justice, Ineptitude, and Gestapo Criminals

The U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps was added to the Red Orchestra information loop late. [40] The British asked the CIC for help in locating relevant records and personalities in 1946. [41] But not until January 1948 did the 970th CIC Detachment fully comprehend that "British intelligence is greatly interested in the investigation of Rote Kapelle and has assigned at least two case officers to work on it exclusively," or that "British intelligence has extensive information ... on Rote Kapelle." [42] By that time, MI-5 was producing their final report, complete with organizational charts, personality indices, and interrogations. MI-5 also concluded that the best sources on the Red Orchestra had been Soviet agents and their associates-not the Germans who tracked them -- and that the wartime Red Orchestra was not especially relevant for understanding postwar Soviet espionage. [43] Yet the CIC did not receive a copy of the 1949 report until 1952. [44]

When stumbling onto the Red Orchestra in 1947, the CIC thought it had discovered an entirely new story. The CIC's interest was triggered by German Red Orchestra survivors' call for the trial of Dr. Manfred Roeder, judge advocate general and chief legal officer of Air Region III (Berlin), and the chief prosecutor to Red Orchestra spies arrested in Berlin. Later known as "Hitler's Bloodhound," Roeder secured Hermann Goring's agreement to try the defendants before a military court-martial and demanded the death sentences that were handed down, even to many whose roles were incidental. Roeder prepared his cases with Gestapo help. He was ruthless in court, arguing that the Schulze-Boysen and Harnack nets were unprincipled, financially corrupt, and composed of sexually perverted scum who acted from the basest of motives. He thus started an argument in Germany that lasts to this day. [45]

Roeder had been in U.S. custody as a Nuremberg witness since May 8, 1945. [46] By January 1947, Army prosecutors had heard accusations that Roeder was a war criminal. [47] In June he underwent a long interrogation by American prosecutor Robert Kempner in which he was dramatically confronted by Adolf Grimme, a socialist minister from the Weimar period and Harnack group survivor now living in the West. [48] In May, Roeder was re-categorized from a witness to "Defendant A"-"a prisoner who is to be indicted and tried" by the Office of the Chief of Counsel for War Crimes. Repeated orders said Roeder was not to be released from custody even for family leave. [49]

The CIC was more intrigued with Greta Kuckhoff, an outspoken Communist survivor of the Harnack net whose husband, Adam, had been executed by the Nazis. Kuckhoff aimed to justify the networks as resistors, rather than traitors, through a public trial of Roeder. [50] United States authorities in Berlin intercepted a telephone call in which Kuckhoff said she was in touch with Red Orchestra survivors who were collecting evidence against the former prosecutor. [51] Gunther Weissenborn, a playwright and Harnack group survivor, suggesred a public survivors' meeting to present evidence of Roeder's criminality. Kuckhoff wanted actual records but said "I am afraid ... that the Gestapo orders for torture ... won't be there." [52]

The CIC did not help Kuckhoff, but instead dispatched Special Agent Hans Johnson, who posed as an American leftist, to speak with her in order to learn the Names of other Soviet agents. "Greta Kuckhoff," Johnson reported,

is in possession of material giving the full story of the Rote Kapelle and its members who were engaged in high-level penetration attempts of the Nazi regime. She knows the full story of the ... trial, the penetration of Rote Kapelle by the Gestapo and the final liquidation of the organization. She also knows that the organization was active in France, Belgium and Holland. It is believed that Greta Kuckhoff also has knowledge of the present activities of the members of Rote Kapelle in Berlin, in the U.S. Zone of Germany and in Western Europe. [53]

In fact, the CIC could learn nothing from Kuckhoff that had not been known to MI-5 (and thus the FBI and CIA) for some time. Even the Names she provided were listed in the 1943 Gestapo Final Report on the Red Orchestra, which the British had found more than a year earlier.

By mid-1947, the CIC in Regensburg launched a full investigation [54] based on the assumptions that Red Orchestra survivors in Germany were still working for the Soviets and that former Nazis were those best suited to discover who and where they were. [55] The CIC Special Agent Benjamin Gorby led the investigation. Roeder, a wanted war criminal, would be the key source. The CIC reasoned, "Since Roeder was in charge of the prosecution of the military members of the ring (and was promoted for his handling of it), he undoubtedly could supply information in great detail." [56] On December 23, 1947, the CIC took custody of Roeder right after his jailers received orders that he was wanted by the Legal Division of OMGUS in Berlin. [57] On arrival in Neustadt, where the CIC took charge, Roeder received the code Name "Othello."

Roeder had his own agenda: avoiding prosecution. All year he had insisted that his accusers were traitors and that he was guilty of no crimes, since Goring had ordered him to prosecute the Red Orchestra cases (in fact, he had insisted to Goring that he try it). Further, Roeder claimed that "the Fuhrer decreed that everyone who took part in the Rote Kapelle were to be sentenced to death immediately." [58] This claim was manifestly untrue; the Gestapo had "played back" some captured agents.

The 970th CIC Detachment also borrowed a senior Gestapo official held by U.S. war crimes authorities, Walter Huppenkothen, assigning him the code Name "Fidelio." During the Polish campaign, Huppenkothen was Army liaison officer for Einsatzgruppe I; in October 1939 he served as Commander of the Security Police in Cracow, and in February 1940 he was transferred to the Name position in Lublin. In July 1941, he succeeded Walter Schellenberg as head of the Gestapo unit A-3 (Reactionaries and Liberals), and in February 1945 he was promoted to Gruppenleiter of Gestapo unit A (Enemies). Captured in Gmunden with the remnants of the Waffen-SS division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler on April 26, 1945, he told his American captors that his last advice from Gestapo Chief Heinrich Muller was, "It's only a matter of time until the Americans will want you in their coming fight against the East. In the meantime, do your best to remain in obscurity." [59] Huppenkothen listened. "[He] is very tightlipped," said one war crimes interrogator, "When questioned about anything involving him personally, he speaks extremely slow, as though he were aware that every word would be counted against him." [60] Huppenkothen insisted, for instance, that his job in Cracow and Lublin was to fight banditry and that he knew nothing about the "Jew Camps." [61]

Huppenkothen had nothing to do with the Red Orchestra case, but in October 1947, Gorby learned that Huppenkothen would soon be extradited to Poland. Gorby suspected a Soviet maneuver, since Huppenkothen as a former Gestapo counterintelligence head knew a lot about Soviet espionage. United States authorities had to get to him first. CIC headquarters agreed with Gorby's assessment that "an attempt should be made to prevent [Huppenkothen's] extradition." [62] Therefore, Roeder and Huppenkothen were housed "in such a place and manner as to convince [them] of the sincerity of CIC's intentions, and the desire of U.S. authorities that [they] be treated commensurate with the quality of information required." [63]

Once in the CIC's care, Roeder took advantage, noting that the Red Orchestra "is still alive and active in more than one country." This comment drove further investigation. [64] Gorby quickly insisted that the interrogation, originally envisioned for three weeks, now become a project of six months or more that would include not only Roeder and Huppenkothen, but also "other personalities who possess a wealth of information and experience in the field of counterespionage and who, to the best knowledge of this Headquarters, have not ... been fully exploited." [65] Roeder provided Names from the Schulze-Boysen net. One of his lists was based on newspapers and included old enemies such as Kuckhoff, Weissenborn, Grimme, and others who could testify against him. The CIC missed the trend, stating instead that these people were all prominently mentioned in the Communist press as democrats and anti-Fascists, but "any [mention] of their connections with the R/K [Red Orchestra] organization had been carefully avoided." Another list included those who, according to the CIC, "belong to the more interesting group of R/K survivors from a counter-intelligence point of view ... Some of [them] are well trained agents and it can be assumed that they are again secretly active." A third included agents Roeder and the CIC thought had been turned, such as Gurevitch and Trepper (the Gestapo arrested Gurevitch on November 12, 1942, and Trepper on December 5, 1942). [66] But the Names Roeder provided were all available in London and Washington with more reliable biographical data. In the meantime, Roeder and Huppenkothen added that to fight the Red Orchestra, the United States would need the help of Gestapo officers who had fought it before. [67]

By May 1948, the CIC decided to sever its relationship with Roeder because "Othello ... has been exploited to the fullest extent. Further use ... is not recommended due to the fact that Othello is a major target for former [Red Orchestra] members and their Soviet sponsors. .. [If] Othello was ever hard pressed he might reveal his relationship to CIC in order to protect himself" Thus "if and when [Roeder] is released, his release [should] be arranged in such a manner that he will not come under the control of Soviet or Soviet-sponsored authorities." [68] This arrangement would of course preclude a trial. Ironically, the 970th CIC Headquarters, after having finally liaised with the British, "share the opinion that Rote Kapelle, as such, is not active today." The time spent with Roeder had thus been operationally worthless. He was remanded to custody to the Office of the Chief of Counsel at Nuremberg in May 1948. [69]

Huppenkothen remained in CIC custody until the end of 1948, providing a sheaf of reports on everything from Soviet intelligence in southern Germany to Soviet intelligence in Switzerland to Gunther Weissenborn's activities. Even if accurate, Huppenkothen's reports contained material that was half a decade old; they were never used. Gorby complained in December that most of the reports had been neither translated nor forwarded to anyone. [70] In the meantime, Huppenkothen dreNamed up ideas to protect himself and fellow Gestapo veterans from justice. His boldest proposal was for a net of former Gestapo officials under his command, which could locate German Communist Party (KPD) members that the Third Reich had once placed in concentration camps. No one, Huppenkothen said, was in a better position to keep tabs on illegal KPD members than former Gestapo officials. But, he warned, the Americans would have to treat former Gestapo officials with respect. Many would be mistrusting due to trials against former police officials, and they would have to be "given some assurances ... " [71]

The Office of the Chief of Counsel, which thought Roeder and Huppenkothen both deserved long prison sentences, was stunned that the CIC had used them. On their return to the control of the war crimes authorities, neither man would answer questions, claiming that they were working for the CIC "Assuming for the moment that their claims of having contacts with the CLC is true," said Benno Selke, the deputy director of the Evidence Division at Nuremberg, "the mere fact that they have revealed such a relationship would in itself seriously question their usefulness." Roeder, Selke said, is "one of the most hated men in Germany ... who could well qualify as Public Enemy No. 1 in any German democracy." Huppenkothen, he continued, "was similarly zealous with members of the German underground and ... leader of the first Einsatzgruppe during the Polish campaign." He added,

This office finds it hard to believe that C.I.C would knowingly enlist the aid of two such notorious, unscrupulous, opportunistic Nazis who would surely have been tried [at] Nuremberg, had the scope of the Nuremberg trials been greater. It seems that their only selling point could possibly be the fact that they are presumably anti-Communist and have knowledge in connection with Russian underground methods.

Hitler had similar anti-Communist credentials, Selke said. [72] Unfazed, the CIC stated that both remained of interest and that while neither had been ordered not to cooperate with war crimes interrogators, both had also been ordered not to divulge the details of their work for the CIC. "That specific information," said Lieutenant Colonel George Eckman of the 7970th CIC Group in Regensburg, "is not believed pertinent in the War Crimes proceedings against these two individuals." [73] This statement was nonsense. Yet the relationship of both men with the CIC, founded on poor intelligence work from the start, had indeed wrecked the chances that U.S. authorities would try either man. [74]

By 1951, Manfred Roeder had used his past as a Nazi supporter to become a West German political figure on the radical right. His relationship with the CIC in 1947 and 1948 showed him that anti-Communism offered protection from prosecution and vindicated his view of Germany's Nazi past. Though not a member of the Socialist Reich Party (SRP) -- a neo-Nazi party founded in 1949 and banned in 1952-Roeder supported the SRP and was close to one of its founders, a volkisch writer Named Fritz Doris. On April 25, 1951, Roeder gave a speech in Luneburg to an overflow crowd on the wartime treachery of the Red Orchestra. He attacked Adolf Grimme, now the general director of Northwest German Radio (Nordwestdeutsche Rundfunk), and Helmut Roloff, another West German survivor of the Schulze-Boysen group and now a concert pianist. The U.S.-sponsored Neue Zeitung charged that Roeder promoted a new stab-in-the-back legend. [75] Perhaps this only encouraged Roeder, in 1952, to publish the Name arguments in Die Rote Kapelle: Europaische Spionage.

Roeder used his prominence to try his luck again with the CIC. He arranged a meeting in the Hotel Gruner Wald in Heidelberg with three special agents from the 66th CIC Detachment (the successor to the 7970th) in January 1952. In a five-hour meeting, he told the CIC agents that he could procure a cache of documents over a meter in height on the Red Orchestra as well as human intelligence from former Gestapo officials. The information, he said, contained photos, information on Red Orchestra personalities, and their present-day activities in West Germany, France, the low countries, and Switzerland. To whet the American appetite, he listed a few people that he said were still active in the Red Orchestra (again, all witnesses against Roeder should he ever stand trial). He could arrange for the Americans to copy the records and to meet former German counterintelligence figures. He could also supply the trial transcripts of the Red Orchestra courts-martial. In return, he and his associates only wished for their old salaries. [76]

The CIC officials in question, none of whom had been involved in the use of Roeder in 1948, were intrigued. They met with Roeder again in February 1952 in Hanover. The meeting was arranged by Dorls, who hoped to take part but was dissuaded by the CIC owing to the close surveillance of Dorls by the West German authorities. Instead, Roeder showed up with count Wolf von Westarp, another SRP member. Roeder explained his strong sympathies to the SRP, "the most ... desirable party from the viewpoint of Germany" and then explained that the records to which he had access reconstructed the entire Soviet net as it operated during the war. Though all of this information had been available for years, CIC agents rated Roeder and his statements as fully reliable ("A-1"). And though the 66th CIC hoped that "a working arrangement can be established with Dr. Roeder," it is not clear what this arrangement amounted tNo. [77] By October, the SRP was banned by the federal German authorities. There is no further reference to Roeder in CIC files nor are there reports on the Red Orchestra that originated with him. It might have been at this time that the 66th finally received the final MI-5 report of 1949, which contained the sketches of Red Orchestra members that Roeder said that he and only he could provide.

The Return of the Gestapo

In March 1953, Rudolf Roessler was arrested in Switzerland for espionage. His November trial received international attention, and stories appeared about his wartime ring in Switzerland. [78] Roessler also told the Swiss Federal Police that he had been recruited by Czech intelligence in 1948 to rebuild the Red Orchestra and to funnel military and air information from Western Europe. [79] The Surete Nationale in Paris, which had been convinced for years that the Red Orchestra still existed in France, believed him. It continued investigating former Red Orchestra members living in France on the assumption that "a number of the subjects are becoming active again." [80]

Roessler's arrest had implications in West Germany, toNo. Until October 1953, the Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz (BfV) led West German inquiries into the Red Orchestra, but in that month the Gehlen Organization took over the Red Orchestra investigation, code naming it "Fire Tongs" (Feuerzange). The CIC learned that both the BN and the Gehlen Organization believed that the World War II version of the Red Orchestra "was only partly shattered" and that "since the end of the war it has been enlarged and is very active in the Federal Republic and all of Western Europe." The Gehlen official heading up Fire Tongs, whose Name the CIC never learned, thought that the threads ran all the way into the West German government ministries. [81]

CONFIDENTIAL

AGENT REPORT

BJMG/er

SUBJECT: Proposed Use of Former Gestapo Personnel to Combat Present Day Illegal KPD Activities

1. In the course of the series of interviews with Walter HUPPENKOTHEN and in line with the set of EEIs prepared by Headquarters 7970th CIC to be answered by him, a number of ideas were discussed which, it is felt by this Agent, should be brought to the attention of higher Headquarters for consideration and possibly voluntary action. In taking such action HUPPENKOTHEN may be of value in establishing certain initial contacts.

2. It should be pointed out that it was not HUPPENKOTHEN who took the initiative to propose the establishing of such contacts through him. Therefore, his suggestions as outlined below should not be interpreted as an attempt on his part to extend the relative security and comfortable life enjoyed by him at this time that is due to the fact that he is in this organization's temporary custody. [Handwritten note: suggest this be incorporated as part of Agent's Notes - D. Forbes]

a. HUPPENKOTHEN started out by saying that, while he did not know what amount of knowledge the American authorities possessed about the extent of and persons involved in the illegal KP activities, he would assume that the Americans must have the intention to gain a clear picture of the illegal activity of the KPD, as well as other Communistic organizations in Germany prior to 1945, their extent and persons involved. To gain such a clear picture, however, is, in his opinion, important because points of departure for a successful surveillance of present Communistic efforts and, furthermore, for counter measures, will necessarily result from conclusions derived from that picture.

b. He, HUPPENKOTHEN himself, has only a relatively limited knowledge concerning this field (Communistic activities) to offer. Part of the Gestapo ...

Page from an unsigned agent report, "Proposed Use of Former Gestapo Personnel to Combat Present Day Illegal KPD Activities," outlining Walter Huppenkothen's suggestions for using his colleagues to combat Communism. The full report is found in NA, RG 319, IRR, entry 1348, Walter Huppenkothen, 222-25.

Confidential

4 August 1948

SUBJECT: Manfred ROEDER and Walter HUPPENKOTHEN

TO: Commanding General, EUCOMOffice of the Deputy Director of IntelligenceAPO 403, U.S. Army

Attention: Colonel Schow

1. Among the internees at present in the Nuremberg jail are Manfred ROEDER, former Generalrichter der Luftwaffe (Judge holding the rank of a General in the German Air Corps), and Walter HUPPENKOTHEN, former SS Standartenfuehrer in charge of Amt. IV E (RSHA - Gestapo).

2. The advisability of trying ROEDER and HUPPENKOTHEN by German authorities under Control Council Law No. 10 is at the present time under consideration by the Legal Division, OMGUS. HUPPENKOTHEN is a member of an organization found to be criminal by decision of the International Military Tribunal. Inasmuch as these two individuals are confined in the Palace of Justice jail, the Office of Chief of Counsel for War Crimes has been asked by the Legal Division, OMGUS, to assist in the investigation and interrogation of these two mentioned individuals as a prerequisite for any further action which may be taken against these two individuals.

3. The interrogations and investigations in the case of ROEDER are seriously hampered, if not completely stalemated, by the fact that he steadfastly refuses to give information, stating that he was so directed by a C.I.C. officer, Lt.-Col. Hayes of Regensburg, for whom he is presently working according to his statement. HUPPENKOTHEN has made a similar claim. It has furthermore been indicated that the C.I.C. is anxious to keep these two men from German jurisdiction, an additional fact further jeopardizing investigations of their cases.

4. ROEDER, one of the most hated men in Germany at the present time, who could well qualify as Public Enemy No. 1 in any German democracy, is a notorious former Air Force Judge, whose brutally harsh and bloodthirsty methods earned him the right to act as "investigating officer and prosecutor," not only in the "Rote Kapelle" case but also in other cases involving members of the German underground.

This Gehlen official was surely Heinrich Reiser. After the German surrender, Reiser, the one-time commander of the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle in Paris, had been captured by the French and debriefed throughout 1948 in the French occupation zone. He was then handed over to the West German authorities, who jailed him in Karlsruhe. He was released on March 30, 1950, and hired within days by the Gehlen Organization. It seemed to be a coup for West German intelligence. With Karl Giering (the original chief of the Sonderkommando) dead and Heinz Pannwitz (leader of the Sonderkommando from 1942) imprisoned in the USSR, Reiser was the senior-most former Gestapo official from the old SonderkommandNo. His quick hiring by Gehlen angered the CIC, which in 1950 still considered the Red Orchestra its own domain of inquiry and had tried to recruit Reiser for itself. [82]

Reiser might have influenced West German understanding of the Red Orchestra. In 1951 he wrote a very long assessment of the Red Orchestra (257 pages of which are in CIA records) based on his contacts in France, articles and books on the Red Orchestra, and his own hunches. [83] Reiser concluded that the Red Orchestra as a GRU organization had been deliberately intertwined with other Soviet organizations, such as the Comintern and the Soviet Secret Police (NKVD), not in competition with them; that the Red Orchestra's components in France, the low countries, Germany, and Switzerland, far from being compartmentalized, had been in deliberate contact with each other; and that the Red Orchestra was not crippled under German pressure, but survived the war and continued to function in the service of global revolution.

Reiser's report showed the dangers of having a former Gestapo officer in a senior postwar intelligence position. Reiser saw conspiracies everywhere. He thought the Red Orchestra during the war permeated all German resistance groups including Wehrmacht resistance circles. Most Schulze-Boysen and Harnack network members, he thought, survived the war and continued their work via "other ways and other lines." Rudolf Herrnstadt, who had worked for Soviet intelligence before 1933 and who was now publicly active as an editor of Neues Deutschland and a member of the Socialist Unity Parry (SED) Central Committee in East Germany, still recruited agents from that position, according to Reiser. "One can compare him," said Reiser, "with certain insects that ... lay their eggs wherever they lie down."

Reiser's report also discussed the Red Orchestra in France. He argued that his old Sonderkommando subordinate, Willi Berg, willingly helped Red Orchestra leader Leopold Trepper to escape in September 1943. Now, said Reiser, Berg was a Soviet agent, likely in contact with Konstantin Jeffremov, another top GRU operative, in Berlin. [84] Reiser argued that Gurevitch "who is likely a type [of] Mongoloid ... [distinguished] by his characteristically protruding lower lip," was active in the Soviet zone of Germany in 1947 and 1948 and that Trepper, "who characterized himself as a non-Jew ... but belongs to the Jewish race or is a half-Jew" was still active, too. Both were in fact in prison in the USSR. Even Pannwitz could now well be working for the Soviets, according to Reiser. In short, the Red Orchestra, connected as it had been to Communist parties; disguised as it was through radio, courier routes, and business covers; healthy as it was through the survival of its top agents; and racially mongrelized as it was by Mongoloids and Jews, still functioned. Reiser concluded that the Red Orchestra in 1945 was "only seemingly dead" (sheintot); it "rose again from the ashes like the apocryphal Phoenix."

Reiser's operations for the Gehlen Organization are not in his CIA Name File, but he ran down leads pertaining to his imagined Red Orchestra. The case of Walter Klein is a case in point. Klein had been a minor Gestapo officer in the Sonderkommando in Paris during the war, responsible for watching Marguerite Barcza's ten-year-old son while Gurevitch worked with the Gestapo. He was held in French custody until April 1949 when he returned to Germany. In mid- March 1951, the French Surete office in Mainz began paying Klein a monthly salary for which Klein was to locate former members of the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle. The French thought that "the present [1951] activity of the [Red Orchestra] only could be cleared up with the help of persons who had already been occupied with the complex previously." [85] Armed by the Surete with the money and travel tickets, Klein liaised with former Sonderkommando officers Willi Berg, Rolf Richter, and Heinrich Reiser. He also compiled a register of all French men and women who had worked for the Soviets during the war. [86] The French thought, based on Klein's lies, that Klein had been a senior official in the Sonderkommando and that he also would give them microfilmed records from that organization. [87]

Reiser, using a business cover, contacted Klein in July 1950, nine months before the French officially hired him, and visited him so often that Klein referred to his former Gestapo superior as "Heini." [88] In February 1951, Reiser procured a print of Klein's microfilm. He also gave Klein Willi Berg's address in West Berlin and used Klein to spy on Berg. [89] Rolf Richter, another former Gestapo member of the Sonderkommando also kept an eye on Klein as a paid source of Reiser's. Klein, who had also tried to sell information to the Soviets, thought that he was using both men. [90] The West German police arrested Klein in November 1951. Reiser eliminated him by telling the West German police, who were unaware that Reiser worked for Gehlen, that Klein was a French agent and that he "is ... criminally inclined." [91] Richter added that "Klein ... claims to have been active in an executive capacity [in the Gestapo] ... only for financial reasons" and was deluded into thinking he could "become Minister of Police in a future [neo-Nazi] state." [92]

In January 1956, Friedrich Panzinger and Heinz Pannwitz returned to West Germany from Soviet captivity. Panzinger, the former head of the Sonderkommission Rote Kapelle whom the Russians captured in Linz in 1946, returned as a Soviet agent to penetrate the Gehlen Organization through his old Gestapo contacts. In return, the Soviets promised to protect him from war crimes charges resulting from his command of Einsatzgruppe A from September 1943 to May 1944. On arriving in Munich, Panzinger informed the BfV of the entire business, and the Gehlen Organization, also promising to protect him against prosecution, decided to play him back against the Soviets. Between 1956 and 1958 Panzinger made eight letter drops to a Soviet cutout in Munich. The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), as the Gehlen Organization was called as of April 1956, hoped to "build [the operation] up as a major deception effort against the [USSR] ." [93] But Panzinger committed suicide in prison in August 1959 after missed communications within the West German government resulted in his arrest for war crimes charges. [94]

Panzinger's bizarre tale led to the suspicion in the BND that Heinz Pannwitz was also a Soviet penetration agent. Heinz Felfe, the actual Soviet spy within the Gehlen Organization, did not leave this suspicion to chance. He told anyone who would listen that Pannwitz had a Soviet mission. Pannwitz repeatedly denied such a mission, but it would remain the accepted wisdom in the BND that Pannwitz was not entirely truthful. Felfe thus diverted attention from himself by using the West German phobia of the old Red Orchestra. [95]

Regardless of its suspicions, the BND hired Pannwitz in August 1956, perhaps to keep him quarantined from the BN and the CIA, both of which had already begun debriefings. [96] Reiser had visited Pannwitz in May to tell him that the BND alone would handle his case. [97] The BND promised to send interrogation reports to the Americans but complained instead that Pannwitz had been a rough nut to crack, leaving the CIA to wonder how the BND had failed to learn anything from such an important source. [98]

Pannwitz acted more like a disgruntled civil servant than a Soviet spy. On arriving in West Germany, he contacted Reiser and other former wartime subordinates in search of employment but insisted on senior state official rank (Oberregierungsrat) that would take account of his years of Gestapo service. Until May 1956 he seems to have hoped for a police job with the BfV [99] On taking employment with the BND he immediately told the CIA his salary, hoping that the CIA would top it. Pannwitz then pressed his BND colleagues to help him avoid any denazification hearings that could affect his pension. By 1958, the BND had pulled the right strings. Pannwitz's Gestapo service, wartime promotions, and eleven years in Soviet captivity were recognized for pension purposes. [100] In February 1958, the CIA noted that Pannwitz "has now ... achieved 95% of what he has been fighting for the past two years ... to gain official recognition of his permanent civil service tenure and the rights associated with it." [101] When the BND gave up debriefing Pannwitz and handed him over to the CIA in 1959, Pannwitz again put money first, wanting a long-term contract from the CIA instead of month-to-month payments. [102] Pannwitz, in short, would not tell his story for free.

CIA interrogators were skeptical of Pannwitz before six months of debriefings began in mid-1959. They noted "his efforts to portray the Gestapo in a more favorable light" and his failure to acknowledge that his playback operations owed to the Gestapo's ominous reputation. The CIA also noted that Pannwitz, like Roeder, was "very emotional over the postwar effort to describe ... the [Berlin] Rote Kapelle complex as 'anti-Nazi resistance fighters' rather than as 'traitors, spying against their native land.'" But they were sure he was no Soviet agent. After long discussion of his years in USSR prisons and camps, the CIA reported that "it is ... safe to state that [Pannwitz] Name out ... with an intense dislike of the Soviet Communist government." "No indication of deception," they added, "was found." [103]

***

Recently declassified U.S. intelligence records throw new light on the Red Orchestra itself and its manipulation by the GestapNo. Mostly though, the records demonstrate the long shadow thrown by the Red Orchestra and its legend on postwar intelligence agencies. The burning desire to understand how it worked, the scope of its success, who had been involved, and who was still active, had a significant impact on a number of intelligence agencies from Washington to Bonn, while inducing surveillance from New York to Berlin. At its worst, the shadow of the Red Orchestra helped to convince certain intelligence agencies to shelter and employ former Nazis. Men such as Pannwitz who had hoped that the Nazi counterintelligence operations could help split the Western Allies from the Soviets surely felt a certain satisfaction.

_______________

Notes:

1. The best summary description is CIA, "Rote Kapelle: A Survey Report." The two volumes were written in 1973, and declassified in 1976. See NA, RG 263, Rote Kapelle Subject File. A more readable description, particularly from the German perspective (despite its age), is Heinz Hohne, Codeword: Direktor- The Story of the Red Orchestra, trans. Richard Barry (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1971).

2. The picture of Schulze-Boysen and Harnack group members as Stalinist traitors is partially a result of their trial by the Nazi state and partly a result of Cold War rhetoric in the Federal Republic of Germany. On this topic see Jurgen Danyel, "Die Rote Kapelle innerhalb der deutschen Widerstandsbewegung," in Die Rote Kilpelle im Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus, ed. Hans Coppi, Jurgen Danyel and Johannes Tuchel (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1994), 12-38.

3. Kopkow was so effective that Hermann Goring awarded him a gratuity of nearly 30,000; see Johannes Tuchel, "Die Gestapo-Sonderkommission 'Rote Kapelle'" in Die Rote Kapelle im Widerstand, 147-53 and note 46. Information from the Special Archive in Moscow shows that Goring had a special cash fund with which to reward those working on the case, amounting to 100,000 marks total. By January 1945, more than RM 67,000 had been paid out to sixty-five different officers, with Kopkow getting nearly half. Kopkow also helped himself to property once owned by the Schulze-Boysens.

4. The count varies between 117 and 119. See Norbert Haase, "Der Fall 'Rote Kapelle,' vor dem Reichskriegsgericht," in Die Rote Kapelle im Widerstand, 167. Records of this courtmartial recently found in Prague destroy the postwar apologia that it maintained impartiality of military law. It admitted evidence secured through torture, its trials were closed to the public, the records were sealed to all but a few, and defendants were given no time to prepare their cases. Forty-five defendants received death sentence by hanging or guillotine, twelve received hard labor, and seventeen received prison sentences. Between the start of the war and February 1945, the Reich court-martial handed down 1,189 death sentences, of which 1,049 were carried out. (During the entirety of World War 1, the German military justice system handed down 150 death sentences, of which 48 were carried out.) The Rote Kapelle judgments found in Prague show a clear political bent on the part of the justices, as did the Nazi insignias in the courtrooms and the bust of Hitler in the reception hall. See Haase, "Der Fall 'Rote Kapelle,''' 163.

10. They would also provide evidence against Communist wartime spies in the United States, such as Alger Hiss; see John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 168ff.

14. MI-5, "The Case of the 'Rote Kapelle': Final Report, part 2, 32, which (based on Foote's information) states that Roessler was a Czech refugee, is wrong on this point as shown by CIA, "Rote Kapelle, A Survey Report," vol. 1, 215.

15. CIA, "Rote Kapelle, A Survey Report," vol. 1, 186.

16. MI-5, "The Case of the 'Rote Kapelle': Final Report," part 2, 51-54. Roessler and Duebendorfer were arrested but held only briefly in 1944. See ibid., 61-62.

17. CIA, "Rote Kapelle, A Survey Report," vol. 1, 221-22.

18. The Swiss penetration of the Rote Drei is beyond the scope of this study. It was the Swiss Federal Police, which had its own signals-interception capability, and not German counterintelligence, that crippled the Rote Drei. In October 1943, the Swiss arrested radio operators HNamel and Bolli and in November they arrested Foote, which cut all wireless ties to Moscow from Geneva. Rado quickly went into hiding to avoid arrest. See CIA, "Rote Kapelle, A Survey Report," vol. 1, 192ff.

19. MI-5, "The Case of the Red Orchestra: Second Report," 104. This comment was also forwarded from the CIG to Hoover in CIG to Tamm, 29 Nov. 1946, NA, RG 65, 100- 344753-3-89, box 43.

20. CIA, "Rote Kapelle, A Survey Report," vol. 2,427-9. The first letter from Duebendorfer was published as part of the Royal Commission Report on Soviet Espionage in Canada.

25. Interrogations of Helbein are not in the FBI's Red Orchestra records but they are referenced in Hoover to SAC New York, 3 Jan. 1947, NA, RG 65, 100-344753-4-257, box 45. Before the second interview, the FBI was tracking his movements in Geneva and England.

31. This information came from the Department of State. Hoover to Leg. Att. Paris, 19 June 1947, NA, RG 65,100-344753-5-175, box 45.

32. The most detailed records are of a Hungarian couple in New York Named Gergely, whose address was found with Duebendorfer's effects when she was arrested in 1943. See NA, RG 65,65-57507, boxes 221-222.

37. Hoover's idea to play back Barcza as a double agent was quickly dismissed by the CIA, which argued that if Barcza had applied for a visa as part of a Soviet espionage mission to the United States, she would not have done so under her own name. Hoover to Director CIA, 28 Mar. 1947, NA, RG 65, 65-57576-2, box 45; CIA Asst Director Memo to Hoover, 4 Apr. 1947, NA, RG 65, 65-57576-15.1, box 45; Hoover to SAC NY, NA, RG 65, 65-57576-6x3, box 45. See also the FBI file on Barcza, NA, RG 65, 65-57576-10-2, box 222.

40. The CIC detachment in Germany between November 1945 and June 1948 was Named the 970th Counterintelligence Corps Detachment. Between June 1948 and November 1949 it was called the 7970th Counterintelligence Group. After November 1949 it was called the 66th Counterintelligence Corps Detachment.

44. MI-5, "The Case of the Rote Kapelle," (1949) is the only major study in Army CIC files and there is no cover sheet to show when the Army received it. The covet of part 3 of the MI-5 report is stamped by the 66th CIC Detachment, however, which did not exist until late 1949 and which did not look into the Red Orchestra seriously until 1952. See NA, RG 319, IRR, entry 134A, box 60, Red Orchestra, vol. 5-6, file 1-2.

46. He was used as a witness in the U.S. cases against Ethatd Milch and against Nazi judges. For summaries of these cases, tried in Nuremberg by the U.S. Military Tribunal, see Der Nationalsozialismus vor Gericht: die alliierten Prozesse gegen Kriegsverbrecher und Soldaten 1943-1952, ed. Gerd R. Ueberschar (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1999),86-109.

74. In October 1948, Selke had Roeder turned over to local German authorities on the hope that he would be arrested and tried. Selke to Sutton, Prison Ops, 25 Oct. 1948, NA, RG 238, entry 200, box 25, File-Roeder 201. Though a case was assembled against Roeder by the West German judicial authorities in Lower Saxony between 1949 and 195 I, Roeder would never be brought to justice. Dr. Hans-Jurgen Fink, the local prosecutor, suspended the investigation in November 1951, convinced by Roeder's own argument that the members of the Red Orchestra deserved no better and that the charges against him were fueled by Communist intrigue. The disillusioned mother of Harro von Schulze-Boysen wrote Gunther Weissenborn that "the important thing is that Roeder is silenced." Shareen Blair Brysac, Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 385-86. Huppenkothen would be tried by the Landesgericht in Munich in 1950, but the verdict was set aside in 1952 by the Bundesgerichtshof. In October 1955 he was retried and sentenced in West Germany to seven years imprisonment for being an accessory to murder. Both court proceedings against Huppenkothen were for his roll in the April 1945 executions at Flossenburg of five conspirators involved in the 20 July plot, including Canaris, Osrer, and Hans von Dohanyi. Huppenkothen was never tried for his activities in Poland.

82. Reiser worked for GV-L but there is little in his CIA Name File on his actual activities. See his brief dossier, undated, in NA, RG 263, Heinrich Reiser Name File.

83. The report is in NA, RG 263, Heinz Pannwitz Name File, vol. 1, and is referenced as Reiser's in Frankfurt to Director, No. [excised], 14 June 1956, NA, RG 263, Heinz Pannwitz Name File, vol. 1; and Chief of Base Pullach to Chief, Frankfurt Operations Base, No. [excised] 14 June 1956 in the Name file.

84. Reiser's belief may owe to the fact that he approved the trip by Berg and Trepper into Paris the day Trepper escaped. Pannwitz would say in 1959 that Berg was "honestly very upset" by the escape and had to be placed on suicide watch, and that he was a loyal Gestapo agent with a close relationship with Muller, since he was Muller's cigar supplier during the war. Pannwitz attributed the escape to the fact that Berg trusted Trepper too much. Pannwitz also said that during his captivity in Moscow, "the Soviets attempted to convince me that Willi Berg was a close, trusted friend of Trepper and a Moscow agent." Att A (para 53, 57) to Chief Munich Base to Chief EE and Chief SR, 17 Aug. 1959, NA, RG 263, Heinz Pannwitz Name File, vol. 2.

93. Chief, EE to Chief [excised], No. [excised]-34599, 6 June 1958, NA, RG 263, Friedrich Panzinger Name File. Panzinger's CIA Name File is sketchy about his arrest in Linz. Since Linz was in the U.S. occupation zone, it is possible the Soviets kidnapped (rather than arrested) him.

94. From September 1943 to May 1944, Panzinger was the SD and Sicherheitspolizei Commander in Riga, and was promoted personally by Himmler for his service there in fighting partisan activity. He also approved in November 1944 the use of prisoners for medical experiments. See NA-BDC, RG 242, A-3343, SSO, roll 364A; and Chief, EE to [excised], No. [excised]- 6514, 8 Aug. 1958, NA, RG 263, Friedrich Panzinger Name File. Both the Soviets and the Gehlen Organization on separate occasions pledged to protect him from arrest, but due to missed communications with the Bavarian authorities, he was arrested anyway, whereupon he rook a lethal dose of poison on arriving in prison; see Chief [excised] to Chief, EE, No. [excised]-45916, 12 Nov. 1959, NA, RG 263, Friedrich Panzinger Name File.

IT IS A COMMONPLACE in the documents declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 that U.S. intelligence services employed and protected selected Axis war criminals in order to employ them as purveyors of (often untrustworthy) human intelligence. That protection also derived in some cases from a principled sense of obligation for services already rendered, however self-serving for the enemy turncoat and only putatively beneficial to the United States. This sense of U.S. obligation survived even when there was little expectation that such hirelings would be of use in the future.

The case of SS-Standartenfuhrer Eugen Dollmann is a classic example of a U.S. intelligence agency perforce coddling a war crimes suspect who was no longer a useful source. Dollmann had played a prominent role in Operation Sunrise, the timely and opportunistic surrender of German forces in Italy on May 2, 1945, one week before the VE-Day capitulation of the remainder of the German armed forces. [1] For U.S. intelligence, failure to shield Dollmann would risk embarrassing public disclosure of continued covert anti-leftist operations by the United States in postwar Italy. Furthermore, it could deter more skilled Nazi intelligence sources from trusting U.S. spymasters' promises of unending protection.

Dollmann's case also illustrates the setbacks to scholarship that resulted from the half-century delay in the declassification of Counterintelligence Corps (CIC), Office of Strategic Services (OSS), CIA, FBI, and Army documentation of war crimes and intelligence dossiers of war criminals. Documents released under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act allow us to fill in some historical gaps and amend otherwise reliable accounts. [2]

Dollmann's Career before Operation Sunrise

Eugen Dollmann was born on August 8, 1900. In the summer of 1918, he served as a volunteer in the 7th Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment. [3] Thereafter, he matriculated at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, majoring in art history and literature, and he was awarded a doctorate magna cum laude in 1926. Since he was a Protestant, his dissertation on "Lazarus von Schwendi and the Political Problems of the German Counter-Reformation" was a fortuitous preparation for his future liaison with Pius XII's Vatican. [4]

Supported by a research grant, Dollmann spent 1927 to 1930 at various Italian universities studying the Farnese dynasty of Parma in the context of the Italian sixteenth century. On the death of his mother in 1934, this seemingly perpetual student had to earn his living. Apparently, his mother had also supported him during his years of study, but he was an incorrigible spendthrift, perpetually strapped for cash. [5] His first gainful employment was as an editorial trainee at the Munchener Neueste Nachrichten, after which he was assigned to Rome as a foreign correspondent. He joined the Nazi Party in February 1934, and his Third Reich career took off in 1935, when he became press leader of the Roman Party chapter. [6] In 1937, he graduated to the staff of the Hitler Youth Leader in Italy. He also served as Roman representative of Wille und Macht (Will and Power), a publication of the Reich Youth Leader. Having translated Marshall Pierro Badoglio's World War I memoirs, Dollmann was best able to analyze the situation after Badoglio defected to the Allies in September 1943.

Dollmann applied for membership in the SS in November 1937. [7] Displaying what appears to be a lifelong penchant for embellishing official forms with surnames that do not appear on his birth certificate, in his SS application, Dollmann gave his mother's maiden name as "von Fischer," suggesting an aristocratic standing. [8] He was accepted within one month as an SS-Mann and simultaneously given the rank of SS-Obersturmfuhrer, an uncommon but not unknown procedure. [9] He was assigned to the Personal Staff of the Reichsfuhrer SS, whose chief of staff was SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Karl Wolff. Dollmann later served as an aide to Wolff, who was the ranking SS officer in northern Italy after 1943.

Although stationed in Rome and assigned to Himmler's personal staff throughout his SS career, Dollmann's ascent in rank was steady: Hauptsturmfuhrer, September 1938; Sturmbannfuhrer, April 1939; Obersturmbannfuhrer, March 1941; Standartenfuhrer, November 1943. He served as Himmler's liaison first to the Royal Italian government and then to Mussolini's Fascist republic. He also served as Wolff's liaison to Mussolini's republic and to the Vatican, and acted as interpreter between the Nazi and Fascist dictators on some occasions. [10]

An entry in Dollmann's CIA file describes him as "very temperamental with a vivid personality and a great sense of humour, but egoistic and a bad organizer: speaks fluent English and Italian and a little French: talks with a slight Munich accent." [11] Whatever his administrative and personal shortcomings, the multilingual Dollmann was an able liaison officer and keen observer, with a talent for rhetoric. Colleagues, acquaintances, interrogators, and interviewers considered Dollmann handsome and charming. After Allen Dulles met him face-to-face in the spring of 1945, he remarked,

[Dollmann] had long black hair, combed back Italian style, and almost effeminate gestures ... He was an intellectual, highly sophisticated, somewhat snobbish and cynical ... As the situation in Italy changed in 1943 ... he now became a kind of top liaison officer between the Germans and the Italian officials, and the church ... In short, he was everybody's man, but only in high places ... It is no wonder, then, that later he was also one of the first Germans to appear as emissary to the Allies. [12]

Dollmann's affinity and affection for Italians, although acquired, was genuine. Italy was his post and playground, its language his metier. Often mufti-clad by preference, he not only combed his hair but also wore his suits Italian style. After the defeat of Germany, he repeatedly attempted to pass himself off as an Italian. Dollmann no doubt hoped to save his own skin by propitiating the victors. His promotion of an early surrender may have also been urged by a desire to avert the devastation of northern Italy, his cultural home.

The military situation in March 1944 found the Allied armies inching toward Rome. The political situation was much more complex: the Pope was attempting to convince the belligerents to make Rome an "open city" from which the Germans would withdraw and which the Allies would bypass. This would keep Rome in control of Mussolini's Fascist regime (derisively dubbed the "Republic of Salo") and the pope as its bishop, preventing the leftist partisan takeover so feared by Pius XII. The German commanders in Italy, contrary to Hitler's orders to fight for every foot of Roman soil, sought only to make a safe withdrawal, sparing their troops to fight another day.

On March 23, 1944, Nazi officials were considering a range of reprisals to the ambush of an SS police unit by Italian partisans in Rome's Via Raselli, during which 32 SS police were killed and many others maimed and wounded. Unable to apprehend the culprits, on the following day the SS shot and entombed in the ancient Ardeatine catacombs 335 imprisoned Romans, including some 75 Jews, none of them involved in the ambush. The Nazi officials also applied the excruciating psychological punishment of "night and fog" (Nacht und Nebel), refusing for weeks to divulge the names of the victims or let anyone enter the Ardeatine caves. [13]

Dollmann foresaw the Roman population's outraged backlash against the reprisal still being planned by his colleagues. He hastened to his longtime Vatican contact, the head of the Order of Salvatorians, Padre Pancrazio (his Bavarian compatriot, born Pankratius Pfeiffer), who was the designated liaison between the Vatican and the German occupiers. At once, Padre Pancrazio consented to appeal to the Pontiff for intervention, and the Vatican did make a diplomatic inquiry about the impending executions to Ernst von Weizsacker, the German ambassador to the Holy See. [14] The Germans replied that this "terrorist" action by Italian partisans could hamper German consent to declare Rome an open city. [15] Pius XII then chose to condemn the "Communist" Italian attackers, rather than the German reprisals. [16]

A persuasive summation of the Pope's motivation deserves repetition here:

[The] Vatican's silence in occupied Rome ... [a] moral failure ... based on Pius XII's committing one of the great misreadings of history, is evidenced by the relationship between the Vatican and the German occupiers -- a Faustian pact by definition. The papal obsession with protecting the physical integrity of the Vatican City-State by any means, against enemies less real than imagined, was fulfilled in exchange for papal silence, not one silence, but one following another, a whole range of silences for the whole range of Nazi and Fascist brutality. [17]

Concerning Dollmann's ideological leanings, a perhaps too-favorable Allied assessment described Dollmann as "unusually vivacious for a German ... extremely intelligent and alert of mind. He is vain and probably without a great deal of principle but has a sense of form that would prevent his sinking to the depths of cruelty and cowardice of many of his colleagues ... He undoubtedly used the SS as a means to a pleasant, easy existence without ever believing in National Socialism." [18]

An anti-Semitic remark attributed to Dollmann is found in a report sent on May 13, 1943, by a visiting Nazi diplomat to a friend in Paris. That diplomat quoted Dollmann as saying that "the Italian armed forces are still riddled with full Jews and innumerable half-Jews." [19] This exaggeration could be taken as Dollmann's subtle discouragement to instituting deportations of Roman Jewry to "the East" -- such as were then underway in France -- which would not go down well with Germany's still-useful Italian military allies. [20] Whether it was so intended by Dollmann can only be surmised in the context of his overall behavior.

Hitler's "Tea Party"

On occasion, declassification of federal records under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act yielded serendipitous historical connections and new perceptions about previously accepted scholarship. One such instance is an intriguing document vividly portraying the impromptu "tea party" at Adolf Hitler's Rastenburg field headquarters, code named "Wolf's Lair" (Wolfsschanze), immediately after the failed July 20, 1944, assassination attempt on Der Fuhrer. [21] As SS liaison officer to Mussolini's Italian Social Republic, Dollmann escorted Il Duce to the so-called tea party, acting as interpreter between the two dictators, as extant photographs attest. This unique event in Dollmann's experience presumably sowed the seed of Operation Sunrise.

For more than a half-century, most nonfiction and media renditions of that bizarre tea party have drawn on its portrayal in Sir Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper's The Last Days of Hitler. [22] An Oxford (and later Cambridge) don and medieval historian before the Second World War, Major Trevor-Roper served as a British intelligence officer assigned at war's end to investigate Hitler's possible survival. Describing his source as "perhaps overdrawn; but not improbably," Trevor-Roper did not identify his human source or cite the origin of his documentary source (although some direct quotations are ascribed to Hitler and Foreign Minister Joachim Ribbentrop). Presumably, the formidable British Official Secrets Act dictated suppression of proper scholarly attribution. [23] Since he could not have been an eyewitness to Hitler's tea party, and there is no other contemporaneous primary documentation, the precise source -- and therefore accuracy -- of Trevor- Roper's account remained an unchallenged mystery.

A 1945 SHAEF Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Center (CSDIC) report released under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act gives us Trevor-Roper's source. [24] The report contains an English translation of the German transcription of a surreptitiously recorded conversation on July 20, 1945 -- exactly one year after the tea party -- between Dollmann and SS-Standartenfuhrer Georg Elling, both then in a British prisoners-of-war cage in Italy. [25] As SS officers, they were in the Allies' "automatic arrest" category and were personally susceptible to indictment as members of an organization declared guilty of war crimes by the Nuremberg International Tribunal (IMT). Dollmann had served as SS police attache at the German Embassy in Rome during 1941-43, and Elling during a corresponding period as SS police attache at the German Embassy to the Vatican. Their closely parallel assignments in Italy may partially explain why Dollmann imparted to Elling the experience that made him turn his coat.

Here follows a comparison of the two transcripts.

Dollmann Transcript

At five o'clock there was a big tea party; it was amazingly interesting, all of them were there, in the Fuehrer's GHQ, and over tea they all began arguing and shouting at one another, and each one putting the blame on the other because the war had not yet been won!

Ribbentrop raved against the Generals, because they had betrayed us to England, Doenitz raved against the Generals, and the Generals raved in their turn against Ribbentrop and Doenitz! The Fuehrer kept quiet the whole time, and Mussolini was very reserved too. Graziani began telling him about his adventures in Africa, when all of a sudden someone happened to mention the 30th of June 1934 [The so-called Rohm Purge during which the SA leadership and various other perceived opponents of the Nazis were liquidated]; the Fuehrer leaped up, in a fit of frenzy, with foam on his lips, and yelled out that he would be revenged on all traitors, that Providence had just shown him once more that he had been chosen to make world history, and shouted about terrible punishments for women and children, all of them would have to be put inside concentration camps!

He shouted about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth for everyone who dared set himself against divine Providence. It was awful, and it went on for about half an hour! I thought to myself, the man must be mad. I don't know why I didn't go over to the Allies there and then.

Mussolini found it most unpleasant. Meanwhile more tea was served by the footmen in white, and Graziani started discussing with Keitel the question of AA troops we wanted from the Italians.

Then a call came through from Berlin, to say that order had not yet been restored there. The Fuehrer answered the call, and started yelling again, gave full powers for shooting anyone they liked, why wasn't Himmler there yet, and so on.

Then came the lovely bit: ''I'm beginning to doubt if the German people is worthy of my great ideas."

At that of course there was a tremendous to-do, they all wanted to convince the Fuehrer of their loyalty. Doenitz and Goering came out with all they had done, Doenitz told him about the blue-eyed boys in blue -- damned rubbish -- and Goering started having a row with Ribbentrop, and Ribbentrop shouted at him: "I am still the Foreign Minister, and my name is von Ribbentrop!" Goering made a pass at him with his Field Marshal's baron. I'll never forget that scene!

The Fuehrer was in a very peculiar state at that time. It was the time when his right arm began to develop a tremor. He sat there almost the whole time eating his colored pastilles [vitamin pills].

Trevor-Roper Account

It was five o'clock when the tea party began, and the whole court assembled in the Fuehrer's headquarters. Conversation was naturally about the Fuehrer's escape, but it quickly deteriorated into recrimination. Voices were raised in high-pitched and bitter argument; and everyone in turn each blamed because the war had not yet been won. Ribbentrop and Doenitz raved against the generals because they had betrayed Germany to England, and the generals raved in reply against Ribbentrop and Doenitz. All the time Hitler and Mussolini sat quiet and reserved, as if mere spectators of the scene, while Graziani told them of his African adventures. Then, quite suddenly, someone mentioned that other famous "plot" in Nazi history -- the Roehm plot of 30th June 1934, and the bloody purge which followed it. Immediately, Hitler leaped up in a fit of frenzy, with foam on his lips, and shouted that he would be revenged on all traitors. Providence has just shown him once again, he screamed, that he had been chosen to make world history; and he ranted wildly about terrible punishments for women and children -- all of them would be thrown into concentration camps -- an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth -- none should be spared who set himself against divine Providence. The court fell silent as the Fuehrer raged for a full half-hour; the visitors thought he must be mad, -- "I don't know" said one of them, [undoubtedly Dollmann, according to Dollmann!] "why I didn't go over to the Allies there and then."

Mussolini looked embarrassed, and said nothing; Graziani sought feebly to break the spell by beginning a technical discussion with Keitel; and all the time footmen, dressed in white, circulated with teapots among the gaping worshippers.

This scene was interrupted by a call from Berlin, where order had not yet been restored. Hitler seized the telephone and shouted his orders into the mouthpiece, giving full orders to shoot anyone and everyone. Why hadn't Himmler arrived yet?

Then came the portentous statement of the megalomaniac: ''I'm beginning to doubt whether the German people is worthy of my great ideals."

These words broke the spell of silence. At once the entire court competed to speak, each protesting his loyalty. In grovelling terms Doenitz sang the praises of the German Navy.

Goering began a violent quarrel with Ribbentrop and made a pass at him with his field-marshal's baron; and the voice of Ribbentrop was heard above the tumult protesting, "I am still Foreign Minister and my Name is von Ribbentrop."

Only Hitler was silent now. The parts in the comic opera were reversed, and the prima donna ceased while the chorus discordantly sang. He sat still; in his hand he had a tube of brightly colored pastilles which he sucked.

Thanks to Trevor-Roper's influential imprimatur, as well as the British Official Secrets Act and American deference thereto, for over a half century Dollmann's unacknowledged and untested one-year-old recollections -- "perhaps overdrawn but not improbably" -- have been accepted as an accurate depiction of the tea-party scene. Since then, virtually all extant accounts of the tea party, whether print, documentary, or docudrama and other genres of historical fiction, unwittingly closely track Eugen Dollmann's remarkable recollection of the circumstances -- vivid despite the intervening most turbulent full year of his life. It has also fostered a prevailing presumption that Adolf Hitler was a ranting psychopath, when more likely he was a cunning fanatic.

Although the undocumented English translation of the CSDIC's near-verbatim text had already been made public by Trevor-Roper in 1947, it remained classified for more than a half century, until made available by the IWG under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act.

Operation Sunrise

It is a compelling surmise that Dollmann's resolve to spur the negotiations that led to Operation Sunrise, which saved an uncountable number of American, Italian, and German lives, was prompted by his dismay at Hitler's appalling behavior at the Wolfsschanze tea party, a dismay already aroused by Hitler's order for the massacre of 335 innocent Roman citizens during the Ardeatine massacres just four months before. That Dollmann contemplated turning his coat on departing the Wolfsschanze on July 20, 1944, can be inferred from his recounting to Elling, exactly one year later: "I thought to myself ... [Hitler] must be mad. I don't know why I didn't go over to the Allies there and then."

TOP SECRET

Excerpt from CSDIC/CMF/X 194

ConversAtion held on 20 July 1945, between DOLLMANN and ELLING.

1. A STORY AT THE FUEHRER'S GHQ.

DOLLMANN: A year ago today exactly I escorted the DUCE from FLORENCE to GERMANY. The train was scheduled to leave at one o'clock on the 20th of July. We were in the station, when suddenly an air raid alarm was given and the whole train had to be blacked out.

ELLING: But it was daylight, surely?

DOLLMANN: Yes, it was broad daylight, and all the same the whole train had to be blacked out, all the windows were covered over and we sat there in the dark! When we arrived at the station -- we were going to the FUEHRER's GHQ -- the FUEHRER was there to meet u, white as a sheet, and his whole staff. HIMMLER, GOERING, KEITEL, RIBBENTROP, and so on, they were all there. I got out after the DUCE, and heart HITLER saying to him: "I've just had the greatest piece of luck I've ever had", and then he went on to tell him about the attempt on his life. Afterwards the FUEHRER and MUSSOLINI and myself went to have a look at the place where it happened. It was a mass of debris.

At five o'clock there was a big tea party; it was amazingly interesting, all of them were there, in the FUEHRER's GHQ, and over te they all began arguing and shouting at one another, and each one putting the blame on the other because the war had not yet been won! RIBBENTROP raved against the Generals, because they had betrayed us to ENGLAND, DOENITZ raved against the Generals, and the Generals raved in their turn against RIBBENTROP and DOENITZ! The FUEHRER kept quiet the whole time, and MUSSOLINI was very reserved too. GRAZIANI began telling him about his adventures in AFRICA, when all of a sudden someone happened to mention the 30th of June 1934: the FUEHRER leaped up, in a fit of frenzy, with foam on his lips, and yelled out that he would be revenged on all traitors, that Providence had just shown him once more that he had been chosen to make world history, and shouted about terrible ...

Translation of a transcript of a German conversation between Elling and Dollmann, surreptitiously recorded while the two were in a POW camp in Italy, which was the unacknowledged source of Trevor-Roper's account of Hitler's infamous tea party (NA, RG 226, entry 190C, box 7, folder 95).

Immediately on his return to Italy, still during the last week of July, Dollmann cautiously began to trim sail, canvassing both Germans and Italians about the possibility of a separate surrender of German armed forces in Italy. He was the realist who first broached to Karl Wolff the suggestion that eventually led to the opportunistic premature surrender of German forces in Italy. Later, during a "scientifically conducted interrogation" [26] On August 20, 1946, Dollmann related that he discussed the advisability of beginning negotiations with the Allies with the German air attache in Italy, Luftwaffe General Ritter von Pohl, "during July 1944" -- presumably within days after his return from the July 20 tea party. [27]

By late 1944, Dollmann pursued several possibilities on Wolff's behalf, directly with the Italian Resistance, but also (through Ildefonso Cardinal Schuster of Milan) with Mussolini and the Fascist regime. He was also parleying with the Italian partisan forces, which were still awaiting recognition from the Allies. [28] Wolff's purpose was to negotiate tolerable surrender conditions for the German forces in Italy, which included buying clemency for himself and his SS subordinates. Cardinal Schuster was simultaneously dickering with the Germans, the Fascists, and the partisans, seeking the best bargain to avert ravage of his diocese. The pope was mainly concerned with preserving his temporal authority over the Vatican City-State as well as preventing a partisan "Communist" takeover of Rome and Italy -- as, to be sure, were the Allies. [29]

Perhaps it was the ambience of the locale, but Operation Sunrise closely resembled a performance from the Commedia dell'Arte, replete with mistaken identities, missed connections, surprise entrances and exits, with everything falling into place just in time for the final curtain. Much of that fantastic story is based on postwar interrogations, interviews, and memoirs, in which numerous German, Italian, and Swiss military and civilian actors claimed a key role in its successful outcome.

By the end of the year, Dollmann was urging Wolff to begin negotiations with the Allies. During an indiscreet conversation about the necessity of a negotiated surrender, Dollmann was overheard by SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Guido Zimmer. Zimmer thereupon introduced Dollmann to Baron Luigi Parilli, an industrialist who had at one time represented the American Nash-Kelvinator refrigerator company, and who feared that a Communist takeover of northern Italy would endanger his financial interests. He contacted an old friend, Dr. Max Husmann, headmaster of a boys' school in Switzerland. Husmann enlisted the cooperation of Major Max Waibel, a Swiss intelligence officer who made the contact to Allen Dulles, the OSS chief agent in Bern. Waibel provided the indispensable cover for Wolff and his emissaries' clandestine incursions into Switzerland. [30]

On February 28, Parilli and Husmann met with Dulles' OSS deputy, American Geto von Schultze-Gaevernitz, in Lucerne. Dollmann was not at that first meeting. But on March 3, 1945, Dollmann, Parilli, and Zimmer were taken in hand at the Swiss border by Husmann and, as a stand-in for Waibel, Swiss Lieutenant Friedrich Rothpletz, who provided security escort to Lugano. Gaevernitz was not there. [31] Instead, the Axis delegation was met by OSS agent Paul Blum, who obviously had instructions only to listen, except to request the release of imprisoned partisan leader Ferruccio Parri and Antonio Usmiani of Royal Italian Intelligence as a test of Wolff's bona fides. [32]

On March 8, Wolff, Dollmann, Parilli, Zimmer, and his adjutant, SS-Sturmbannftihrer Eugen Wenner, slipped across the border to Lugano, where they were met by Rothpletz and Husmann. Encouraged by the liberation of Parri and Usmiani, Dulles decided to meet with Wolff alone at an OSS secret house in Zurich. Dulles arrived with Gaevernitz in tow. [33] The discussion went so well that on April 23 Wolff dispatched Dollmann to the supreme German commander in Italy, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, to secure his concurrence in the surrender. [34]

Meanwhile, it had become necessary to coordinate negotiations with Allied Forces Headquarters (AFHQ), Field Marshal Harold Alexander's Allied command in Italy. On March 18, Alexander's American deputy at AFHQ, Major General Lyman Lemnitzer, and British Major General Terence Sydney Airey, AFHQ intelligence chief, arrived at Ascona. Dulles and Gaevernitz introduced them to Wolff, who was accompanied by Wenner and Zimmer. The ubiquitous Parilli and Husmann, as well as the indispensable Waibel, were also there. Dollmann had been left behind at Wolff's headquarters to cope with any emergencies that might arise. [35]

At that inauspicious moment, on April 26, 1945, Kesselring, who had succeeded Rundstedt in the shrinking western command in March, was now elevated to supreme command of the entire western and southern fronts, by now condensed to the western borders of Germany, but also including northern Italy and the remaining foothold in the Balkans. Upon this prearranged escalation to the pinnacle of his military career, the notoriously ambitious Kesselring reverted from a grudging tolerance to angry disapproval of negotiations for a separate Italian surrender. Wolff simply ignored him. Kesselring's successor, General Heinrich von Vietinghoff-Scheel, at first balked but then acquiesced to the inevitable. The capitulation terms were signed on April 29 by Wolff's adjutant Wenner, and Colonel Viktor von Schweinitz on behalf of Vietinghoff, culminating in the May 2 surrender of all German forces in Italy.

On the day following, perhaps the most fitting tribute to Operation Sunrise was sent by secret telegram to Dulles from the OSS headquarters in Washington by his colleague, John Magruder, Deputy Director of the OSS: "Countless thousands of parents would bless you were they privileged to know what you have done. As one of them privileged to know, and with a boy in the mountain division, I do bless you." [36]

Mter such an accolade, it is not surprising that Dulles and the OSS, especially its Special Services Unit (SSU), Central Intelligence Group (CIG), and CIA successors, felt some obligation to the Nazi war crimes suspects whose turncoat cooperation, whatever their motives, made Operation Sunrise feasible and provided the feather in Dulles' cap that led to his appointment as Director of the CIA.

Dollmann's postwar career as a would-be U.S. protege illustrates the vexatious thicket that entrapped the victors when they assumed obligations toward turncoat war crimes suspects. There can be no doubt of the salient role Dollmann played in Operation Sunrise, but thereafter, as an intelligence peddler, he proved to be worthless. His career had sharpened his natural talent for liaison work, not intelligence. Yet, he incessantly offered dubious information and promoted harebrained schemes because he needed money. Nevertheless, after the war, the United States protected him from prosecution as a war criminal.

On May 7, 1945, while they were still at their respective stations in Italy awaiting roundup into Allied captivity, Wenner had anxiously written to Dollmann: "What happens to those members of the Security Police designated as war criminals? Should something be undertaken against this ... [in view of Field Marshal] Alexander's radio assurance that Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS, Ordnungspolizei, Sicherheitspolizei are to have the Name conditions?" [37] Despite their collaboration with the Allies during Operation Sunrise, Wenner and Dollmann remained subject to automatic arrest as SS officers.

The uniform treatment SS personnel hoped to read in General Alexander's radio message -- let alone special rewards -- was not forthcoming, so Wenner and Dollmann surrendered to British forces at Bolzano on May 13, 1945. They were confined in a POW cage at Modena until October 7, 1945, [38] when they were transferred to a British compound at Ancona. Angered by the "rough treatment" they received, they escaped on December 20, 1945. [39]

Harbored in an insane asylum near Milan, Dollmann received a false identity card from the Italian Military Intelligence Service (SIM), purportedly in return for recruiting two German scientists for the Italian Navy. [40] Perhaps disoriented by their deranged surroundings, Dollmann and Wenner succumbed to threats to turn them over to the Italian courts on war crimes charges unless they endorsed Cardinal Schuster's fraudulent claim to have negotiated the May 2 surrender. [41]

In August 1946, Dollmann and Wenner were kidnapped and taken into custody by the SSU, a short-lived successor of the OSS. They were allowed a limited mobility, and an Italian police officer recognized Dollmann on the street early in November 1946, just when Dollmann and Wenner were about to be moved to a monastery. [42] The SSU successor and CIA predecessor agency, the CIG, promptly took Dollmann and Wenner into custody and moved them to Rome, issuing them IDs signed with the cover Name "Major O'Brien." [43] Dollmann's was a "phoney document using Name Name already on his Italian ID: 'Ammon."' [44]

On November 13, 1946, James Angleton deemed it necessary to justify his characteristically high-handed actions with respect to Dollmann and Wenner. In a memorandum to G2 of the U.S. Army Mediterranean Theater, he wrote that "military honor dictated that we should honor the promises made to these men." As aides to General Wolff in consummating Operation Sunrise, they had benefited U.S. interests by averting such threats as

a redoubt in Austria, which may have resulted in a Tito or Russian occupation of parts of Venezia Giulia as well as much of the present Allied zones in Austria ... a "scorch[ed] earth" policy in North Italy ... to render it impossible for the Allies or the Italians to restore ... a bankrupt Italy [which] would have resulted in severe political disturbances [and] costliness in Allied lives. [45]

On January 14, 1947, preparatory to the trial of Field Marshal Kesselring, Italian warrants were issued for the arrests of Dollmann, SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Herbert Kappler, and SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Erich Priebke and Kurt Schutz. [46] Of these, only Dollmann was in U.S. custody, and he was ill with an infected ear and kidney. [47] An inter-Allied debate ensued whether under such an invidious spotlight it was prudent to protect him in appreciation for his role in the Operation Sunrise surrender. [48]

In a statement printed in the Italian and world press, General Airey had denied any Dollmann role in Operation Sunrise. [49] But Airey, representing AFHQ, had been brought into the surrender negotiations with Dulles and Gaevernitz only as of March 17, 1945, after Dollmann's last direct participation on March 8. Allen Dulles and Major General Lyman Lemnitzer, the principal American negotiators, however, confirmed Dollmann's early participation. Unfortunately, it was too late to avert AFHQ publication of Airey's denia1. [50]

Airey's erroneous announcement was assiduously disseminated by Italian leftists. The assumption that Dollmann was a war criminal dogged him during his lifetime. Perhaps also because he had spent so much time associating with Italians, he had become a symbol of the Nazi occupation to the Italian Left. A May 16, 1945, article in L'Epoca described him as an "ill-famed, snake-like man of the nine months of Rome, of the subsequent 10 months of the north the tyrant of the Fascist Ministry of Interior, the messenger of Himmler." [51] That reputation persisted, for example, in Blowback, Christopher Simpson's classic indictment of U.S. coddling of Nazi and Nazi-collaborator war criminals. In deploring Allen Dulles' solicitous attitude toward SS war criminals who contributed to the success of Operation Sunrise, Simpson mentioned Dollmann, but the available information allowed him to say no more than that Dollmann was "instrumental in the killing programs directed at Italian Jews," and was "in American hands in 1947 yet managed to escape to Switzerland in the early 1950s." [52]

By the time of Simpson's 1993 reprise, The Splendid Blond Beast, more information had become available and Dollmann figures more substantially. However, aside from quoting Dollmann's self-serving observations, Simpson reiterates the incorrect passage on Dollmann's involvement in the deportation of Italian Jews. [53] As we have seen, Padre Pancrazio attested that Dollmann had gone to some risk in vainly seeking papal intervention to avert the Ardeatine Caves massacre.

Conversely, there is abundant newly declassified evidence that Dollmann was not only "in American hands in 1947," as Blowback had it, but was impartially shielded from British, Italian, and German prosecution. He was also tolerated successively by the OSS, SSU, CIG, and CIA throughout 1945 to 1954 in his attempts to peddle various absurd intelligence schemes.

Dollmann was undoubtedly a rogue, a wastrel, and a former SS officer, but he was neither a brute nor a killer. The initial Allied reservations about shielding Dollmann against Italian charges of war crimes in the Ardeatine cave case had soon been alleviated. His otherwise personal adversary, SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Herbert Kappler, as a prosecution witness On the first day of the first Ardeatine trial of Generals Hans von Mackensen and Kurt Malzer (November 18, 1946), exonerated Dollmann of Ardeatine involvement. [54] Although no promises had been made to any of the Germans involved in Operation Sunrise, CIG feared Axis intelligence sources would dry up unless some protection were offered to Germans who had risked their lives in making a separate surrender.

Against much opposition and consequent delay, in April and May 1947, U.S. military authorities obtained State Department concurrence for Dollmann and Wenner to be taken into U.S. custody and released into the American zone of occupied Germany, subject to its denazification courts. [55] Not daring to show its hand during this process, which lasted many months, the CIG nevertheless wanted to insure, after the fact, that the beneficiaries of these favors were aware of the identity of their benefactors. So, in July 1947, they wrote to EUCOM Special Operations in Heidelberg: [56]

1. Following forwarded for your information on Dollmann and Wenner who were turned over to G2, EUCOM on 19 May by [sanitized]

2. D. W. case taken our of our hands by G2 AFHQ and 46. Both held in local MP jail under difficult circumstances. During this period CIG made every effort to prevent

a. turnover of D to Italians

b. return of Wenner and Dollmann to British custody, and to obtain their removal from this theater.

With Washington backing this finally carried out. MP detention resulted on souring both; therefore we made no effort to contact them during their detention. Both have information which would place present Italian political regime in bad light if published. We solicit your aid in assuring expeditious rehabilitation and preferential treatment within sep regulations now in force. Desire, if possible they be informed directly of our part in achievement program outlined paragraph 2, above ...

4. Would like from them some address at which they could be contacted in event future necessity. Also we hold certain articles of clothing and books of Dollmann which desire to forward.

5. Our real Names we believe still unknown to them. Name Major O'Brien adequate for recognition. [57]

This attempt to propitiate both beneficiaries "soured" by the "difficult circumstances" of their sojourn in an MP jail was sufficiently transparent so that certainly the clever Dollmann was encouraged to apply subtle blackmail whenever his shrunken exchequer required.

Attempting to shed further responsibility for Dollmann, EUCOM ran him through the standard process during June 1947. He filled out a German registration form and a denazification form, both cluttered with characteristic biographical embellishments contrary to fact, and was discharged from the Waffen-SS on June 30. [58] But he was detained until October 24, 1947, at Oberursel for intelligence exploitation by EUCOM CIC, particularly about Italian political factions, during which his American captors continued to disagree about whether Dollmann, as well as Wolff and staff, had actually risked their lives for Operation Sunrise. [59] He was given US$450 worth of Swiss francs, papers for residence in the American zone of Germany, and ordered to report weekly to CIC Munich. [60]

Perpetually short of cash, Dollmann had been involved since 1945 in several clandestine ex-Nazi organizations attempting to peddle intelligence. To prospective backers, he hawked a yarn about a cache of German armored equipment buried by the Brandenburg Regiment in a cave in Austrian-Tyrol by the gauleiter of Tyrol, Franz Hofer. [61] While attempting an illegal border crossing into the French occupied zone of Austria in January 1948, in pursuit of this purported "Hofer cache," Dollmann was arrested by French military police. Only with some embarrassment did the American liaison at Innsbruck obtain his release. [62]

In January 1950, CIA agents in Italy received an eleven-page report in Italian, purportedly from Dollmann. Bad as were most of the reports submitted by intelligence peddlers trying to earn a dishonest day's pay, this one is saturated with Name-dropping, gossip, and insinuations calculated to interest CIA agents. In a sense, both agents and sources were dependent on these reports for income, careers, and promotion. But if this was the best a desperately impecunious Dollmann could produce, it proved that the erudite scholar and cultured, adroit liaison emissary was a total loss as an intelligence source. [63]

In 1951, Dollmann departed Germany for Lugano, Switzerland, [64] only to be expelled to Italy on February 8, 1952, as a war criminal bearing a false Italian passport under the alias "Ammon." [65] He was also alleged to have engaged in homosexual acts, perhaps only as a pretext for his expulsion, but he never denied the allegation. His American protectors soon characterized him with a "reputation for blackmail, subterfuge and double-dealing ... a homosexual," although the last assumption may have been based purely on hearsay. [66]

In March 1952, he reached Spain via the "ratline," the U.S. Army's system for smuggling fugitives out of Europe. In Spain, Dollmann allegedly came under Skorzeny's "protection." [67] A December 6, 1952, article in the magazine Epoca, based largely on an interview with Dollmann, quotes him as claiming to have personally opened two crates containing "the Fuhrer's treasures: golden cigarette cases with his autograph, watches with his initials, pearl and diamond pins" subsequently buried by Franz Hofer near Innsbruck. [68] Dollmann, who had spent considerable time with his Fuhrer, undoubtedly knew that Hitler was adamant in refusing to allow smoking in his presence. Obviously strapped for cash as usual, Dollmann was recklessly appealing to greed in his desperate trolling for backers.

Dollmann returned to Germany in October 1952 on a fatuous mission ro locate and excavate the buried treasure trove he had already bruited about to various European newspapers during 1952. Now he added to the temptation of avarice a well-timed lure for U.S. Cold War propagandists. He averred that this buried trove consisted not only of Hitler memorabilia, but of special files on the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact purportedly also buried by Gauleiter Hofer. Although Dollmann's description of the special files was adequate, their alleged location was literally far afield, and their excavation by American troops had occurred years before. [69]

On October 7, 1952, he disembarked in Frankfurt Rhein-Main airport from a KLM flight from Madrid bearing a passport in the Name of Enrico Larcher, on which the embossed seal had been replaced with a photograph. During a court hearing on the matter the following day, Dollmann did not contest the charges that he falsified the passport. He was sentenced to sixty days in Frankfurt's Hammelsgasse prison. [70]

In August 1954, the impoverished Dollmann approached Vice Consul Alan James at the U.S. Consulate General in Munich with an offer to plant an agent in the Soviet zone of Germany. He presented himself as "Dollmann von Fischer," the bogus title of nobility with which he embellished his mother's maiden Name in his SS membership application years before. [71] Presumably assuming he still could blackmail his U.S. intelligence protectors, Dollmann asked James to forward-to President Eisenhower no less -- for American review and comment galleys of his forthcoming Italian language memoirs revealing his OSS contacts. [72]

Dollmann was a man of many talents, marred by many character flaws, possessed of superb liaison skills, but a flop as an intelligence agent. An opportunist inhibited by occasional moral twinges, he was trapped in a time and place that ultimately thwarted fulfillment of those talents, while magnifying those flaws. He died in Munich in 1985.

_______________

Notes:

1. Between the May 2 surrender and the VE-Day surrender of May 8, there were two other partial surrenders: on May 5, German armies cut off in northern Germany surrendered to Montgomery's 21st Army Group; on May 5-6, Heeresgruppe G in southeastern Germany and Austria surrendered to Dever's 6th Army Group. For more on the Nazi occupation of Rome and Operation Sunrise, see chapter 3.

2. For a glaring example, see Elizabeth Wiskemann, The Rome-Berlin Axis: A History of the Relations between Hitler and Mussolini (NY: Oxford University Press, 1949), listing both Trevor-Roper (1946) and Allen Dulles (1947) in her bibliography and correctly identifying the former's unidentified and the latter's identified source of their descriptions of the tea party as "coming from Dollmann later in captivity" (p. 334, n.3), which asserts without a source that the "German Reign of Terror was organized by ... the indispensable Dollmann" (pp. 325-6). She makes no reference whatsoever to SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Herbert Kappler, who as a prosecution witness at the first Ardeatine Cave trial on November 18, 1946, had already exonerated Dollmann of any Ardeatine involvement, who in fact had attempted to inhibit the reprisals (see pp. 319 and 328-9).

3. He was the son of Stefan and Paula (nee Schummerer) Dollmann. See birth Register Regensburg No. 959/1900, 66th Group, memo of 4 Aug. 1953, cited in NA, RG 319, IRR, entry 134B, box 40, Eugen Dollmann. This CIC Personal File is more precise and more reliable than his CIA Name File (NA, RG 263, Eugen Dollmann Name File) presumably because in the first years of occupation, military government had direct custody of German official files.

5. Fully one-half of Dollmann's sixty-page SS Officer File consists of accounts which show that during his well-paid SS service he was always in advance of salary and in arrears on repayment.

6. Nazi Party Member No. 349254.

7. SS No. 289 259.

8. Biographical data on Dollmann through 1937 are from his official Third Reich SS Officer File, specifically his holograph vita written in applying for SS membership. See Dollmann's SS Officer File, NA-BDC, RG 242, SSO, roll 159. For Dollmann's career until war's end, see John Toland, The Last 100 Days (New York: Random House, 1965); Allen Welsh Dulles, The Secret Surrender (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); Robert Katz, Death in Rome (New York: Macmillan, 1967), as well as his The Battle for Rome: The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans, and the Pope, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003); Bradley F. Smith and Elena Agarossi, Operation Sunrise: The Secret Surrender (New York: Basic Books, 1979); Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988). Toland offers a wealth of detail, but is too prone to accept Dollmann's account, as does Katz. Dulles verifies Dollmann's role in Operation Sunrise, but thereafter merely mentions his escape from internment.

11. Typewritten card undated and source sanitized, NA, RG 263, Eugen Dollmann Name File. In his November 1937 SS application, Dollmann claimed competency in French, Italian, and Spanish, but not English, possibly to support his preference for assignment to Italy or at least the Mediterranean area.

12. Dulles, Secret Surrender, 56-57. The description reflects Dulles' respect and even admiration for Dollmann. However, Dollmann struck Dulles' OSS subordinate, Paul Blum, as "a slippery customer ... with his dark look, his long black hair combed straight back and curling a little over his ears"; ibid., 75.

13. The most thorough account of the Ardeatine cave affair is Katz, Battle for Rome. The mostly favorable references to Dollmann are much as in Katz's earlier work, relying chiefly on Dollmann's published accounts and his self-serving statements to Allied interrogators. In a brief supplement, "Pacelli v. Katz et al." (Battle for Rome, 353-54), an account of Katz' trial for defamation of Pius XII, which with appeals ran from 1974 to 1978, Katz reinforces his previous appreciation that Dollmann, although a prosecution witness, supported Katz's defense by revealing the warning to the Pope through Padre Pancrazio of the incipient Ardeatine reprisals. Other than that postscript, Katz's new book does not deal with Dollmann's postwar vicissitudes, except to refer to him-mistakenly as contended in this essay-as "a source for Allied intelligence" (Battle for Rome, 24).

14. Katz, Death in Rome, 67, 79-80, 87-90; Battle for Rome, 232n10-14. Katz quoted Dollmann as complaining of Pius XII's passivity during the Ardeatine cave massacres, which Dollmann initially denied. Dollmann had refrained from mentioning his approach to the Vatican in his memoirs because he believed Padre Pancrazio was still alive, but he confirmed it after learning that the Padre had died in an automobile accident (Death in Rome, 247-48). Konstantin (Prince of Bavaria), independently states that Padre Pancrazio corroborated the fact and purpose of Dollmann's visit in his book The Pope: A Portrait from Lift, trans. Diana Pyke (NY: Roy Publishers, 1956), 257. During an interrogation of Dollmann conducted by British intelligence on August 20, 1946, however, Dollmann denied being in Rome during the Ardeatine massacres; see Angleton memo of 13 Nov. 1946, NA, RG 319, IRR, entry 134B, box 40, Eugen Dollmann, 4. This was either an attempt to deny any involvement, or an attempt to protect Padre Pancrazio from exposure to Vatican rebuke, a protection Dollmann maintained until learning of the Padre's death.

20. Mussolini's ouster on 25 July 1943 removed whatever inhibitions remained on the German roundup and deportation of Roman Jews to Auschwitz, which commenced in October 1943. Pius XII said nothing, failing to follow up an independent initiative undertaken by his Vatican subordinates, Padre Pancrazio and Bishop Alois Hudal. For a comprehensive account of the deportation of the Roman Jews to Auschwitz and the Pope's failure to intervene, see Katz, Battle for Rome, 6 J -85, 100-116.

21. The meeting was held in a teahouse on the Wolf's Lair compound in lieu of the conference hut devastated by the assassin's bomb. While other men of power entertained guests at their home bars, teetotaler Hitler frequented or maintained a teahouse at every property he occupied or owned before and after coming to power, including those at several of his wartime field headquarters.

23. The Geneva Conventions prohibit eavesdropping of conversations between unsuspecting prisoners-of-war, but permit a direct interrogation if its protection requiring that they yield only Name, rank, and serial number is waived.

24. NA, RG 226, entry 190C, box 7, folder 95. This document is an extract of a CSDIC report that Allen Dulles obtained from G2 SHAEF at the OSS Mission in Berlin in September 1945, apparently for use in writing Germany's Underground (New York: Macmillan, 1947), his book on the German resistance and the events of July 20, 1944. In his book, Dulles cryptically alluded to (his CSDIC report: "Dollmann has given a vivid description of (he macabre meeting." See Germany's Underground, 9-11. Dulles paraphrased Dollmann's account, and, unlike Trevor-Roper, avoided near-plagiarism of its English translation.

25. In his memoirs, Dollmann presented a discursive, self-serving, less vivid, but essentially similar account of the tea party, unaware (hat his 1945 conversation with Elling had been surreptitiously recorded. See the Interpreter: Memoirs, trans. J. Maxwell Brownjohn (London: Hutchinson, 1967), 320-25.

26. Memorandum dated 20 Nov. 1946, NA, RG 263, Eugen Dollmann Name File, 8. This is evidently a euphemism for a lie detector test, as opposed to an "unscientifically" conducted third degree grilling.

27. In a deposition signed "Max Ritter von Pohl" on August 15, 1945, while he was held in a prisoner-of-war cage at Cinecitta near Rome, Pohl placed this first political "discussion" at his headquarters near Florence "at the end of June 1944"; see Dollmann, Interpreter, 312-14.

28. See the accounts in Smith and Agarossi, Operation Sunrise, and Dulles, Secret Surrender.

29. Katz, Battle for Rome, 345-46.

30. Toland, Last 100 Days, 239-40, contains an excellent sketch of these personal connections, which is verified by reports in the NA, RG 263, Eugen Dollmann Name File and other pertinent documents declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act.

31. This was a disappointment to Dollmann, who had spent an evening a trois with Gaevernitz in autumn 1940 at the Roman home of German Embassy attache Carl F. Clemm von Hohenberg, a friend of the part-Jewish Gaevernitz (by then an American citizen) from shared years in the United States during the 1920s. Clemm's notes are quoted in Dollmann, Interpreter, 174-75.

34. No date, WC 000757. NA, RG 263, Eugen Dollmann Name File. According to Dollmann's "scientifically conducted" interrogation of August 20, 1946, he caught up with Kesselring on August 26 at Pullach, near Munich, when American troops were only fifty miles north. See Dulles, Secret Surrender, 223. For more on these events, see chapter 4.

35. Dulles, Secret Surrender, 105-16.

36. Facsimile, 3 May J 945, RG 226, entry 190C, box 7.

37. National Archives Microfilm Publication, RG 242, T175, roll 225, frames 2736802-3. The translation is mine. During my service with an American Historical Association team describing captured German records to be microfilmed for deposit in the National Archives, I encountered a personal communication on Wenner's letterhead (as Karl Wolff's adjutant) dated 7 May 1945, signed "Eugen," and addressed to "Eugen." My description in Guides to German Records Microfilmed at Alexandria, Va., Records of the Reich Leader of the SS and Chief of the German Police (RFSS) No. 39, page 8, reads in part: "... sent to a friend by Stubaf Eugen Wenner"; obviously, I was then unaware of me significance in that context of the identity of the recipient, Eugen Dollmann.

40. Memo dated 27 Nov. 1951, ibid, 1. Dollmann promptly made a copy of his false ID on the shrewd assumption that it would some day be confiscated; see memo dated 7 May 1952, NA, RG 263, Eugen Dollmann Name File, with attached reproductions of that passport. Two German physicists, Hermann Oberth, rocket propulsion expert, and Gottfried Koch, chemist and vice director of the Buna plant in Schkopau, were employed by the Italian Navy in La Spezia. See memo CIA to AC of S, G-2, re: Eugen Dollmann, 17 Nov. 1951, NA, RG 263, Eugen Dollmann Name File, 2. Whether Dollmann had been the go-between, or this was just a pretext for issuing him the false passport, is a matter for conjecture.

41. Telex dated 20 Nov. 1946, NA, RG 263, Eugen Dollmann Name File, 1-2. Monsignor Gregario Bicchieri, Schuster's aide, and Captain Ghisetti of SIM fraudulently claimed for Cardinal Schuster-and thus for the Catholic Church-the credit for negotiating the surrender. This was probably an attempt to prop up Pius XII's justification for remaining neutral, purportedly because he was on the verge of securing designation of Rome as an open city. That way he would avoid the calamity of an "atheistic Communist" takeover of Rome, his very own bishopric. See also Dollmann, Interpreter, 340-41.

42. 20 Nov. 1946, NA, RG 263, Eugen Dollmann Name File, 5.

43. "Major O'Brien" was a cover name for the famous (or for many, notorious) James Angleton, who served with the OSS in Italy, 1944-45. He was the SSU agent who "directed the kidnapping of Dollmann and Wenner," (see Angleton memo of 13 Nov. 1946), and was CIG station chief for Italy in 1946-47, and Chief of CIA Counterintelligence, 1954-74. See Timothy J. Naftali, "Artifice: James Angleton and X-2 Operations In Italy" in George C. Chalou, ed., The Secrets War: The Office of Strategic Services in World War II (Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 1992), 218-245; Memoranda of 22 Apr. (p.2), and 20 May (p. 1),1947, read: on 19 Nov. 1946, ''Angleton promptly wired his headquarters in Washington explaining the whole situation." NA, RG 319, IRR, entry 134B, box 40, Eugen Dollmann.

53. Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 236. Vatican officials Padre Pancrazio and Bishop Alois Hudal attempted in vain to prevent these deportations, possibly through Dollmann in his official liaison role. See Karz, Death in Rome, 88, unnumbered note, and his Battle for Rome, 106-08.

54. Report of 20 Nov. 1946, NA, RG 263, Eugen Dollmann Name File, 7.

55. The CIG, the State Department's U.S. Political Advisor in Germany Robert Murphy, and Allen Dulles collaborated to shield Wolff, Dollmann, and Wenner from prosecution by the Italian government and even by the U.S. authorities in Germany. EUCOM actually smuggled the three SS officers our of Italy on May 16, 1947. See memorandum of 10 Dec. 1951, NA, RG 319, IRR, entry 134B, box 40, Eugen Dollmann, 4.

65. Memo of 24 Feb. 1952, ibid. It is unclear, given his propensity for making copies of his own fake IDs, whether this was the false ID issued him in 1946 by Roman authorities at the request of the Italian Navy, or the substitute in the Name Name furnished by the CIG.

66. Memo dated 23 Apt. 1952, ibid., 2.

67. So that his Italian escorts could slip him into Spain in March 1952, a passport was issued to him in the Name of "Francesco Venzoni," which they thereupon confiscated. Bur he meanwhile had taken careful note of its content, which he later used to report his "lost" passport, for which Italian officials issued a replacement. Evidently, he had learned something from the intelligence operators among his SS colleagues. In pursuit of the buried treasure, he reportedly entered Austria by way of Germany, giving his Name as Enrico Falscher, meaning "falsifier," which exactly fit the situation.

68. A translation of that article in Epoca magazine of 6 Dec. 1952, was sent by an American agent to the U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics; Charles Siragusa to Harry Anslinger, 3 Dec. 1952, NA, RG 263, Eugen Dollmann Name File. Similar articles had already appeared earlier in 1952 by Charles Foley in the British Daily Express, as well as in the Corriere della Sera and the Hamburger Abendblatt.

69. Nazi microfilm of records of the negotiations and terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, scheduled by Hitler and Ribbentrop for destruction along with the original paper records, were excavated by American forces from the slope of a pine forest about 300 yards from Schonberg Estate, which was about twelve miles from Muhlhausen in Thuringia. German Foreign Office official Karl von Loesch, who had secretly buried the microfilm, guided them to the site of the cache. See British Co!. R.R. Thomson's report 1945 (PRO London, copy in U.S. files); State Department 1945 reports and telegrams printed in FRUS/originals in NA; Interrogations of Karl von Loesch, August 1945. See also, C-Span coverage of Robert Wolfe, "Surviving Microfilm Documenting the Nazi-Soviet Pact," at Heritage Foundation, September 1994, in NA, RG 242, T 120, F-serials, rolls 1-26 (the so-called Loesch series).

ON MAY 23, 1960, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion rose in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, to make a stunning announcement. "Adolf Eichmann," he revealed, "one of the greatest Nazi war criminals, is in Israeli custody." Nearly two weeks earlier, Israeli officers had nabbed Eichmann on a quiet street in a suburb of Buenos Aires as he walked home from work. Eichmann, who once lamented to SS colleagues that only 6 million Jews were murdered under his supervision, had been living under the alias Richard Klement for a decade after the war. Once he realized the Israelis would not shoot him on the spot, Eichmann admitted his real identity.

Eichmann's abduction came as a complete surprise to the U.S. government. [1] The Israelis had given no warning to the CIA (the principal point of contact between the Israeli intelligence community and Washington since 1951) that they had tracked down the most famous living Nazi war criminal and would summarily bring him to justice. In the final days of World War II, Allied counterintelligence officers had assumed that Eichmann would take his own life rather than risk capture. But by late 1945, based on the testimony of two former SS men, the Allies concluded that he had somehow escaped their dragnet and was on the run. The Israelis decided that his fifteen-year odyssey had to end. [2]

Documents released in response to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 reveal that had the Israelis not made the effort to capture Eichmann, he might well have ended his years in peace in Argentina. Despite the intensity of U.S. interest in finding Eichmann in the immediate aftermath of World War II, by the 1950s the hunt had faded into the background. [3] With a war raging in Korea and a covert struggle for military secrets and political influence underway throughout Europe and the rest of Asia, U.S. intelligence resources were stretched thin, and there was no political will to divert any of it toward finding the last of Hitler's henchmen. In 1953, when a congressional request to determine whether Eichmann was hiding in the Middle East led to a brief flurry of official interest in the fugitive, the CIA explained to interested U.S. senators that it was no longer responsible for tracking down Nazi fugitives, even the notorious Eichmann. "While CIA has a continuing interest in the whereabouts and activities of individuals such as Eichmann," explained a CIA officer with the approval of the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, "we are not in the business of apprehending war criminals[;] hence[, we are] in no position to take an active role in this case." [4] The senators apparently accepted this mission statement. Noting that "'the Hill' was satisfied" with the CIA's position on the Eichmann matter, the Agency then queried its stations in the Middle East for information about his possible whereabouts. [5] Finding none, the inquiry was suspended in 1954. [6]

The U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) shared the CIA's view that the pursuit of Nazi war criminals was incompatible with meeting the demands of the Cold War. As the only intelligence service with the power of arrest in occupied Germany and Austria, the CIC had spearheaded the hunt for Eichmann in the late 1940s. Under the pressure of its new Cold War mission, however, it, too, lost interest in him. "At this time, 1952, the apprehension of war criminals is no longer considered a mission of CIC," the 430th Detachment wrote to higher headquarters in the U.S. Army in Austria, adding, "It is also believed that the prosecution of war criminals is no longer considered of primary interest to U.S. authorities ... Therefore, it appears the Salzburg police authorities should be advised that the arrest of [Adolf Eichmann] and [his] transfer to CIC is no longer desired." [7] United States Army commanders did nor fully agree with the decision of Detachment 430 to wash its hands of the responsibility for dealing with Eichmann. Nazi war criminals remained on a watch list, and if the Austrians were to pick up Eichmann, he would have to be handed over to the CIC. But there would be no new U.S. efforts to track him down. [8]

It should come as no great surprise that an unfinished mission from World War II, even one as important as punishing the perpetrators of the Holocaust, got short shrift in the U.S. struggle with the Soviet Union. Yet, the Israeli capture of Eichmann did more than refocus attention on those men who had managed to elude justice in the chaos of the immediate postwar period; for the CIA, this unexpected event would force a re-examination of some of the former Nazis it had recruited in the rush to produce intelligence results in the 1950s. Some of Eichmann's associates, it turned out, had worked for the CIA.

From the moment word of Ben-Gurion's announcement reached Washington, the CIA was eager to learn how the Israelis had scored their coup. The Agency was nor even sure where Eichmann had been arrested and by which of Israel's famed secret services. [9] There were rumors that he had been caught in Kuwait, and there was also some reason to believe that he had been found in Argentina. [10] Just as the CIA was preparing a congratulatory note to the Mossod, its Israeli counterpart, [11] the Counterintelligence (CI) Staff of the Directorate of Operations launched a research operation to scour U.S. government sources for information on Eichmann that might be used to get the Israelis to talk about the operation. [12] Headed by James Angleton since its inception in 1954, the CI Staff would later be described in various secondary accounts as the CIA's holiest of holies, with Angleton playing the role of keeper of the secrets to a succession of CIA directors in the 1950s and 1960s. [13] The truth was much less grand. In 1960, the CI Staff was a backwater with neither full access to operational materials nor a team of agents to run any operations on its own. The one exception was the CI Staff's leading role in U.S.-Israeli relations: Angleton and his colleagues were exclusively responsible for the CIA's liaison with Israel's Mossod and Shin Bet, its domestic security service. It was in support of this liaison that the CI Staff took it upon itself to do some extra digging to locate materials in U.S. archives on Eichmann.

It did not take them long to find what they needed. Their inquiry took them across the Potomac to a former torpedo factory in Alexandria, Virginia, where five miles' worth of captured Nazi records had been stored for over a decade. [14] Originally under the control of the U.S. Army, these documents -- which came from the German Army as well as the SD -- were in the process of being declassified. Among the millions of pages of material was a passel of documents detailing the activities of the first Jewish Affairs Department staffed by the SS. Established in 1936 under the supervision of Leopold von Mildenstein, the Department would eventually design policies for the elimination of Jewish influence from German life. This office was the forerunner of the murderous anti-Jewish unit in the Gestapo that Eichmann would later run. Available to the CIA for over a decade but left unexploited until June 1960, these documents listed the names of Eichmann's associates in the persecution of German and Austrian Jews.

On June 15, 1960, the CI Staff handed the Israelis the documents found among the captured records in Alexandria. [15] "In order to assist you in your interrogation of [Eichmann] and for the preparation of your case in court," the CIA explained to the Israelis, "we have been ransacking the captured German documents ... for material relating to [Eichmann]." Earlier, the CI Staff had sent an urgent request to the Berlin Document Center (BDC) for any files it might have on the names mentioned in the Eichmann materials. [16] Controlled by the U.S. Department of State mission in Berlin, the BDC held the SS personnel files captured at the end of World War II. (The Nazis had fastidiously maintained detailed files on the career paths and family backgrounds of each member -- including foreign members -- of the SS.) Meanwhile, the acting chief of the CI Staff, S. Herman Horton, sent a memorandum to Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles outlining the preliminary results of the Staffs "concentrated search" for materials on Eichmann. [17]

Horton's memorandum set off alarms on the top floor of the CIA headquarters, for unknown to the CI Staff, a few of the names which they were now investigating in Berlin and sharing with the Israelis were or recently had been CIA assets. On June 17, Dulles' office sent a cable to CIA stations in Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Munich explaining the new Eichmann problem and advocating caution. Headquarters' initial concern was strictly operational, not moral or even political: If the Soviets had somehow already figured out that these CIA assets had been mixed up in anti-Jewish work, would they not have tried to blackmail these agents into switching sides? The association with Eichmann, CIA headquarters advised the stations that had worked with these agents, would have made them "very vulnerable and could have eased RIS (Russian Intelligence Service) recruitment." [18] If this were not enough of a headache for Dulles and his team, the West German police had just sent word to the State Department that as a result of the Eichmann capture, they had arrested Leopold von Mildenstein, who was seeking immunity on the grounds that he was a U.S. intelligence agent. The West Germans hinted that they were prepared to drop the charges if indeed Eichmann's old ally was a U.S. asset. [19] The Eichmann capture had yanked several skeletons out of the closet.

Whereas the CIA immediately wondered whether these assets might have been blackmailed by the Soviets, more compelling questions linger four decades later: Why did the CIA have any postwar relationships at all with individuals who had worked alongside Adolf Eichmann in persecuting and exterminating millions of people? Under what circumstances could individuals with these records be considered acceptable agent material? Leaving aside the moral dimension for a moment, what operational value could these veterans of the war against the Jews have had in the clandestine struggle with the Soviet Union? The organization for which they worked, the SD and later the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), was the intelligence arm of the SS and of the Nazi Party. Like most intelligence services in totalitarian regimes, the SD was more the watchdog of ideology than of truth. The fact that some of these men were in the anti-Jewish office of this already ideological service should have made their intelligence credentials even more suspect.

Yet the CIA was in postwar contact with at least five men who had been significant participants in Hitler's war upon the Jews. Their names are Leopold von Mildenstein, Otto Albrecht von Bolschwing, Erich Rajakowitsch, Theodor Saevecke, and Aleksandras Lileikis. Mildenstein, Bolschwing, and Rajakowitsch had served with Eichmann in the prewar Jewish Affairs Department. [20] Mildenstein had been Eichmann's boss in the SS before World War II. Bolschwing, who also worked for Mildenstein, had been Eichmann's tutor on Zionism and the politics of Palestine in the mid-1930s and then his ally in persecuting the Jews of Austria. Rajakowitsch, who had also worked with Eichmann in prewar Austria, later represented Eichmann's wartime anti-Jewish bureau in occupied Holland, where he participated in organizing the deportation of 80 percent of that country's Jews to the death camps. Saevecke and Lileikis, though not formally associated with Eichmann's office, also participated in implementing aspects of the Final Solution. Saevecke was an SD officer who sentenced prisoners to death in a concentration camp in Poland, chased down Jews for slave labor in Tunisia, and supervised Jewish deportations from northern Italy to the death camps in the East. Lileikis, a Lithuanian security police chief, ordered the deaths of thousands -- if not tens of thousands -- of Jews in his hometown of Vilnius. None of these five men figured prominently at the Nuremberg war trials; they were the local chiefs whose individual acts of cruelty reflected the murderous policies of their superiors. Each of these men was either employed by the CIA or was considered an acceptable target for postwar recruitment. Before the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, scholars and the interested public had only fragmentary knowledge about the CIA's relationship with Bolschwing. The story of the Agency's encounters with the other four are new to the public record and told here for the first time.

This chapter seeks to explain how and why these war criminals were given employment, assistance, and, in two cases, U.S. citizenship by a nation that had lost over 300,000 lives in World War II and whose moral compass had inspired an international commitment to prevent further crimes against humanity. This is not the story of a dark conspiracy, nor is it one of well-meaning innocence. Each man was contacted separately and by different CIA officers. In some cases, Agency representatives understood the full extent of the criminal past of the individual at the time of recruitment; in others, they did not. In every case, however, unless a court had already convicted the individual for major war crimes, the CIA assumed the tainted man could be exploited without consequences. The CIA did not bother to look deeply into the background of those it was interested in recruiting. As seen now in the thousands of pages of newly released materials on Nazi war criminals, the CIA and its representatives consciously chose to fight the Cold War in an amoral environment where recruitment decisions rested primarily on the perceived operational utility of an agent. As these five representative cases demonstrate, the CIA's approach to the recruitment of former Nazis produced operational failures, moral turpitude, and the risk of severe political damage. The Nazi war criminal consistently got the better end of the deal in his relationship with U.S. intelligence.

Leopold von Mildenstein

Before the Israeli capture of Eichmann, Leopold Eduard Stephen von Mildenstein was more a West German embarrassment than an American one. After leaving the Jewish Affairs Department in 1937, he joined Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry, where he spent the war designing virulent anti-Allied and anti-Semitic tracts primarily for use among Arabs in the Middle East. [21] After the war, he parlayed his experience with Goebbels into an attractive resume for jobs in marketing. Coca Cola's West German unit hired him as its press secretary. Mildenstein spoke excellent English, having lived in New York City between November 1923 and April 1925, just after completing his university studies in Germany. He also maintained superb contacts among the German political elite. Despite his Nazi past, Mildenstein was a respected member of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the libertarian political party that was popular among the country's business class. In May 1956, he was elected deputy chairman of the press committee of the FDP. [22]

Mildenstein wanted to establish a relationship with the U.S. government, probably with the CIA itself. He had visited the United States in July 1954. At the request of an unidentified "foreign government" -- probably the West German government -- Mildenstein was granted a U.S. visa despite his known wartime affiliation with the SS. In January 1956, Mildenstein himself approached the political officer at the U.S. embassy in Bonn for help in securing a U.S.-sponsored exchange grant for journalists. Although told by the State Department that "his Nazi background" plus the fact that he "was not an active journalist" made him ineligible for the grant, Mildenstein continued to visit the U.S. Embassy. [23] Finally, in May 1956, following his election to the FDP's press committee, he told a U.S. foreign service officer that he had "useful and valuable info[rmation] ... which he [was] willing to exchange for unspecified consideration." [24]

Mildenstein's interest in serving as a U.S. agent reached the CIA, and the station in Frankfurt opted to consider him as a potential "operational contact." Frankfurt requested traces -- a search for any relevant information -- on Mildenstein from other CIA field stations and the headquarters in Washington. The local CIA officers already understood the nature of the man they were considering. Mildenstein was an "unsavory type," they cabled Washington, "and probably has [a] continuing relationship with [a foreign government]." Nevertheless, a certain foreign government official who provided this information believed that Mildenstein was the type of man "with whom [a] coldly calculated business relationship" could be maintained "without undue operational effort." [25]

There was little activity following this request. The CIA station in Stuttgart advised Frankfurt that Mildenstein had been a prewar propaganda agent for Goebbels in the Middle East, where he also wrote articles for the Nazi press. It also noted some evidence that he had been in the SS and "possibly [the] SD," but there were no specifics. The trace request drew no other CIA comment on his SS past, let alone any reference to the Jewish Affairs Department. Headquarters, it seems, had nothing to add. In any case, the CIA station in Frankfurt decided not to pursue the case any further.

Mildenstein next turned up in Egypt working for the government of Gamal Abdul Nasser. In December 1956, the Turkish press reported that he had been hired by Egypt's powerful "Voice of Arabs" radio station along with other former associates from Goebbels' organization. [26] Mildenstein's experience in inciting the Arabs against Jews in the Second World War was highly prized in Egypt. This was confirmed by a CIA report from Cairo, which listed him among a group of influential former Nazis who were shaping the actions of the Nasser government. [27]

It seems unlikely, given the released information, that the CIA recruited Mildenstein in Egypt or anywhere else following its brief dalliance with him in the summer of 1956. It was therefore with some surprise that the CIA learned in June 1960 that Mildenstein was seeking immunity as a U.S. intelligence agent. CIA Frankfurt, whose personnel had changed since the last time that Mildenstein had been of any interest, cabled Washington to find out whether he should be protected. "No indication [of] Kubark [CIA] interest since [redacted] 15 June 1956," Washington replied, and "unless further information is available [in the] field[,] no current HQS interest exists." [28] There remains the possibility that another U.S. intelligence service did have some contact with Mildenstein. If this happened -- and Mildenstein was not simply blowing smoke in June 1960 to save his hide -- then it was probably in Egypt, where the U.S. military attache in Cairo was in contact with some of the former SS officers who were serving the Egyptian government. [29]

The CIA had reason to be concerned that Mildenstein claimed an operational relationship to weather the storm that followed the capture of Eichmann, but it had no reason to be surprised. CIA headquarters knew very well that the Agency had hired Nazis even more odious than Mildenstein.

Otto Albrecht von Bolschwing

When Otto Albrecht von Bolschwing heard the news that Israel had captured Eichmann, he contacted one of his former case officers in U.S. intelligence, who had since retired from the CIA. [30] Although he was a respected U.S. citizen with a good job at the drug company Warner-Lambert, Bolschwing feared the wrath of the Israelis. He told his former case officer that he might also be abducted. The retired U.S. intelligence officer, who had only a superficial knowledge of Bolschwing's actual career in the SS, could not understand his former employee's anxiety -- it was inconceivable that the Israelis would try to snatch Bolschwing on U.S. soil -- and so he turned to an acquaintance in the CIA's Counterintelligence Staff to learn more about him. Once Bolschwing's former case officer saw the captured German records found in the torpedo factory, he was shaken, saying that neither he nor others had known about Bolschwing's past, and asserting that "we would not have used him at that time had we known about it." [31] Some of what this intelligence officer did not remember knowing had been known by others in the CIA from the moment Bolschwing was hired.

Bolschwing's Criminal Past

The case begins in prewar Palestine, where in the mid-1930s Bolschwing operated as an SD agent, first undercover as a monk in Nazareth and then under commercial cover in Haifa. [32] His reports were sent to a bureau in the SD that studied the activities of Freemasons and Jews; under his friend Leopold von Mildenstein, this bureau was later transformed into the Jewish Affairs Department.

Born in 1909 the second son of Junker nobility, Bolschwing inherited only a facility with languages and an aristocratic demeanor. Anti-Semitism was not a birthright of Junkers, but it certainly would be expected of members of the Nazi Party, which Bolschwing joined in 1929. Bolschwing's anti-Semitism was largely a matter of cynical opportunism. Jews whom he later met in Palestine actually believed that he was sympathetic to Zionism, seeing in the establishment of an anti-Communist and anti-British Jewish state in the Middle East a useful ally for a powerful Germany." [33]

This period in Palestine brought the first stirrings of Bolschwing's enthusiasm for political operations. He tried to meet secretly with Arab tribal leaders to encourage them to assist the Jews in ridding the area of the British. Bolschwing hoped the Arabs would stage a diversion of their own to coincide with a Jewish revolt against the British authority. [34] Nazi Germany wanted to make Palestine ungovernable for Great Britain. Although the term had yet to be invented, the twenty-six-year-old Bolschwing was already aspiring to be one of his country's greatest covert operators.

When the British threw the meddlesome Bolschwing out of Palestine in mid-1936, Mildenstein brought him back to Berlin to assist the Jewish Affairs Department. Bolschwing refused to take a regular position in the office, which would have meant accepting an entry-level rank in the SS and respecting a formal chain-of-command. Instead he insisted on being named a consultant. This decision would later make it easier for Bolschwing to hide this phase of his career. At the time, however, it was seen as a sign that the young aristocrat was too big for his boots. [35]

Despite his haughty manner, Bolschwing worked hard to be relevant in the office. Only a few weeks into his new post, he produced a study of Palestine that attracted the attention of SS Chief Heinrich Himmler himself. Seeing that the office's principal concern was what to do with the Jews of Germany and less the future of Palestine, Bolschwing quickly showed that he could be useful in this regard, too. He drafted a policy document outlining how to solve "the Jewish problem." [36]

The document left no doubt where Bolschwing stood on the Jewish question. He advocated reducing Jewish influence in Germany both by forcing Jews to leave and by limiting the economic power of those who stayed. To get Jews to leave, Bolschwing advocated the use of terror:

A largely anti-Jewish atmosphere must be created among the people in order to form the basis for the continued attack and the effective exclusion of them ... The most effective means is the anger of the people leading to excesses in order to take away the sense of security from the Jews. Even though this is an illegal method, it has had a long-standing effect as was shown by the "Kurfurstendamm riot" ... Psychologically, this is even the more comprehensible since the Jew has learned a lot through the pogroms of the past centuries and fears nothing as much as a hostile atmosphere which can go spontaneously against him at any time. [37]

And if the terror proved insufficient, Bolschwing suggested the licensing of all Jewish businesses as a precursor to their expropriation. Bolschwing's ideas echoed those of Adolf Eichmann and others in the department. When Austria joined the Third Reich in 1938, Bolschwing was invited to assist Eichmann in developing a program for expropriating Jewish property and forcing Austrian Jews to emigrate.

In March 1940, probably as a reward for his work in the Jewish Affairs Department -- which by this point had been transferred to the Gestapo under the command of Adolf Eichmann-Bolschwing received a plum foreign posting. He was named Himmler's representative in Romania, responsible for all SD activity in the country. The paper trail leaves unclear what, if any, political mission he carried with him. Bolschwing, however, acted as if he were in Bucharest expressly to enhance the power of the ultra-Fascist Iron Guard movement, which, despite the Fascist leanings of Romania's pro-German strongman Marshal Antonescu, had been shut out of any government positions. Initially, Bolschwing's efforts were greeted with success. In October 1940, the Romanian dictator Marshal Antonescu joined with the Iron Guard in forcing the Romanian king to abdicate. Certain members of the Iron Guard were then brought into the new government. Bolschwing's success was marked in another, even more pernicious way. Following this government shakeup, the Romanian government issued a series of anti-Jewish edicts. For the first time, Jewish property had to be registered. Having shaped German anti-Jewish laws and participated in their extension to Austria, Bolschwing was well suited to serve as the Iron Guard's advisor on how to do the same in Romania. [38]

Whether because of Bolschwing's advice or not, the Iron Guard subsequently overplayed its hand in Romanian politics. The relationship with Antonescu was never easy, but by early 1941 both sides understood that there was little reason to expect it to continue. When the Iron Guard struck first, Antonescu responded with military force. Bolschwing's immediate response was to support his clients. He moved the top thirteen men of the Iron Guard movement, including its head, Horia Sima, into the SD's residence in the German Embassy compound. Himmler supported the protection of the Iron Guardists, but the Hitler regime, in general, disapproved of Bolschwing's meddling in Romanian internal affairs. The Iron Guard rebellion was not in line with Nazi foreign policy, whereas the support of the existing Romanian government was considered paramount, especially in light of Hitler's plans to attack the Soviet Union later that year. Before the rebellion was put down, the Iron Guard gave the Romanian people a horrific demonstration of their hatred of the Jews. The capital's Jewish quarter was fire bombed. Synagogues were destroyed, and as many as six hundred Jews were killed, some hung on meat hooks in a gruesome attempt to defile orthodox butcher shops.

Bolschwing did everything he could to protect the perpetrators of the Bucharest pogrom. As he had argued in 1937, he viewed pogroms as useful tools to discipline Jewish behavior. When Antonescu sought to arrest Horia Sima, Constantin Papanace, and the rest of the men who had challenged his leadership and launched the pogrom in Bucharest, Bolschwing organized an operation to exfiltrate the men to Germany. He had to work quickly because the Romanian government wanted Himmler's people -- especially Bolschwing himself -- out of Bucharest. Before leaving the country, Bolschwing was able to lay the groundwork for getting Sima and the others out. A few weeks later, the top thirteen Iron Guardsmen escaped from Romania via Bulgaria. [39]

Bolschwing's criminal activities, however, did not end with the protection of the leaders of the Bucharest pogrom. After serving less than a year in a Gestapo prison in 1942-43 (probably as punishment for his insubordination in Bucharest, or perhaps for some other reason), Bolschwing went back into the Jewish extortion business. He participated in expropriating from its Jewish owners a major Hamburg medical supply company called Pharmacia. [40] After stealing 20 percent for himself, he relinquished some control of the Vienna office of Pharmacia to German military intelligence for use as a cover. [41]

Bolschwing and the United States

Otto von Bolschwing

As the war drew to a close, Bolschwing understood that the days of the Thousand Year Reich were numbered. He needed to find a way to survive. His second marriage to an Austrian woman gave him an opportunity to reinvent himself. His new brother-in-law was a member of O-5, the Austrian resistance movement that sprang up in 1943 when the Allies announced that Austria would be treated as a separate country. In late 1944, Bolschwing, who had by now brought his family to Salzburg, began working for the O-5 unit in the Tyrolian Alps. For a less pliable man, the transformation from Junker aristocrat to Tyrolian underground operative would have been too difficult to pull off. But Bolschwing played his new role so well that the leader of the local resistance unit would sign an affidavit attesting to Bolschwing's career in the Austrian resistance. [42]

Fortunately for Bolschwing, the first U.S. Army officers whom he encountered were in military government and not intelligence, for Bolschwing was not completely unknown to Allied intelligence. In 1940, the Poles had reported to their British allies on a Bolschwing, code named "Ossie," who was heading German intelligence in Bucharest. [43] This information appeared in the German primer, a biographic register of all known German intelligence officers, compiled by the British and shared with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the U.S. Army's CIC. Beside Bolschwing's name in the primer was the note, "traveled to Palestine in 1934 in the hope of discovering a treasure chest believed to have been buried by the German Army in 1918." [44]

The reference to Palestine was not the only indication in these early portraits that Bolschwing might have had something to do with the Nazi persecution of the Jews. At the end of the war, some other information emerged that placed Bolschwing as an advisor to the Iron Guard at the time of the pogrom. In August 1945, a captured SS officer named Heinz Jost described him as a captain in the SS who had nor only been a leading player in the Iron Guard affair but also had single-handedly smuggled Horia Sima and the others to Germany. [45] These interesting tidbits aside, Bolschwing was considered a minor figure and no one in the Allied counterintelligence community bothered to investigate further. No search was made for any relevant captured Nazi documents, and nothing more on him was sent to the field. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army did not do any background tracing of him on its own. Instead it relied on an autobiography supplied by Bolschwing, which skipped over the years 1936-1940.

In April 1945, Bolschwing became "closely affiliated" with the headquarters of the 410th Infantry. There he cultivated a relationship with his first American patron and protector, Lieutenant Colonel Ray F. Goggin. Bolschwing, wrote Goggin in the first of his testimonials, "materially assisted the armed forces of the United States during its advance through Fern Pass and western Austria prior to the surrender of the German Army." Goggin credited Bolschwing with capturing over twenty high-ranking Nazi officials and fifty-five officers and also with "leading patrols that led to the capture of many more." [46]

Well aware of his own role in the persecution of the Jews, Bolschwing was eager to create a sense of obligation on the part of Germany's new occupiers that would insulate him from prosecution. He worked for the U.S. military administration in southern Germany into 1946. Sensing, however, that his greatest long-term value would be in the field of intelligence, Bolschwing deftly moved into a contractual relationship with the Gehlen Organization, a U.S.-subsidized German foreign intelligence service under U.S. Army supervision. [47] Bolschwing had tried for direct recruitment by the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), the immediate precursor to the CIA. But when CIG officers in Vienna took a look at Bolschwing in early 1947, they decided he was not worth recruiting. [48]

This initial rejection by the CIG would be an unusual event in Bolschwing's charmed career. He usually made an excellent first impression. Almost every intelligence officer, American or German, who encountered Bolschwing left thinking that he was exceedingly bright. [49] The impression was helped by Bolschwing's facility with languages: besides his native German, he spoke flawless French and English. But the CIG man in Heidelberg, Henry Hecksher, was as experienced an agent handler in Central Europe as one could find. Once he and his colleagues in Heidelberg and Vienna looked beyond the sales pitch, they found an unreliable man. [50] The key to their immunity to Bolschwing's charm was that they did not bother to socialize with him. Instead, they evaluated him strictly on what they knew of his Nazi career. In this spirit, a contemporaneous CIA assessment of Bolschwing explained, "Most evaluations of B (based without exception on study of biography rather than personal association) run as follows: self-seeking, egotistical; and a man of shifting loyalties." [51]

Bolschwing, however, was good enough for the Gehlen Organization, which in 1947 was expanding rapidly. Keen to acquire secret sources in the Balkans, the Gehlen Organization hoped Bolschwing would be able to use his contacts to reconstruct the old SS networks, comprising ethnic Germans in Romania (Volksdeutscher) and Iron Guardsmen (or Legionnaires). He was assigned to a unit that specialized in operations in Romania. Bolschwing was one of several former SS men hired by the West Germans for this work in 1947 and 1948. [52]

Bolschwing was not especially successful as an agent recruiter for Gehlen. Despite their loyalty to him for his efforts in 1941, the leaders of the Iron Guard had little interest in working as intelligence gatherers for Bolschwing. Horia Sima and Constantin Papanace were more interested in fighting each other for predominance among the refugees of the Iron Guard movement than in making a small contribution to containing the Soviet Union. Within about a year, the West Germans realized that the smooth-talking Bolschwing was an operational blowhard, not worth the black market gas, cigarettes, and U.S. dollars required to pay him. [53]

Ironically, just as Gehlen was preparing to oust Bolschwing for poor performance, political events in Central Europe introduced a new factor that would bring the CIA, despite its predecessor's earlier misgivings, into the case. The surprise split between Stalin and Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia in 1948 had created a possibility for agreement among the four Allied Powers on what to do about Austria. Since 1946, the talks had been deadlocked by Yugoslavia's demand, as supported by Moscow, for the cession of the southeastern provinces of Austria. But with Tito now considered an enemy, the Soviets announced in late May 1949 that they would accept the British, French, and American position on the borders of the new Austria. [54] While important issues still remained, there was reason to believe that an agreement which would end the military occupation of the country might be around the corner.

The prospect of an independent Austria forced the CIA to think hard about the future of its operations in the country. Since 1945, the U.S. civilian espionage services -- the OSS, the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), and then the CIA -- had been the least funded and ultimately the least established of the agencies collecting intelligence for the United States in Austria. The CIC, though initially designated to follow matters of security, became the largest collector of political information. By 1946, there was yet another entrant in this competition. The Gehlen Organization was permitted to collect information in Austria on behalf of the U.S. military. The Gehlen Organization (called "Ausodeum") had extensive contacts in the displaced persons camps in Austria and among Germans who had fled to Austria from Eastern Europe.

In the fall of 1949, the CIA undertook a series of measures designed to prepare for the end of military occupation in Austria. [55] The Agency recruited Thomas Lucid, the former chief of operations of the CIC 430th Detachment, the main U.S. military security unit in all of occupied Austria. [56] The hiring of Lucid coincided with the initiation of a penetration operation to determine the nature of all CIC operations in Austria. [57] The Agency intended to keep those networks that were worthwhile and drop those that were not. Concerned about the rebirth of German nationalism in Austria, the Agency also decided to displace Ausodeum and co-opt some of its assets. [58] James Critchfield, the chief of the CIA's Pullach base in Bavaria, played a pivotal role in deciding which of the CIC's and Gehlen's agents in Austria the CIA would acquire. Bolschwing's name had come to Critchfield as a possible recruit to salvage from Ausodeum. For some time, Bolschwing had been making noises to the CIA station in Salzburg that he wanted to transfer from the Gehlen Organization to the CIA.

Once again Bolschwing managed to sell himself as a useful intelligence asset, though this should have been impossible. From 1934 through 1949, his intelligence career had amounted to very little. He had been thrown out of both Palestine and Romania, and he managed to so anger his own government that he spent nearly a year in jail in 1942-43 and was demoted to SS sergeant in 1945. What's more, he had produced very little for Gehlen. An ill-fated covert operator and ineffectual agent-controller, if looked at objectively, Bolschwing had little to offer the CIA. Moreover, leaving aside his questionable value as an intelligence asset, the man was a political problem. At the very least he was known to have harbored the perpetrators of three nights of terror, which left hundreds of Romanian Jews dead and their neighborhoods destroyed.

At this point, however, his value as an asset was not conceived in terms of his ability as an agent. His recruitment was supported on the assumption that he had access to large groups of Iron Guardsmen and Austrian personalities. Before giving his approval, Critchfield requested a detailed background report on Bolschwing. A short while later, he received a two-page document that retold the familiar tale of Bolschwing in prewar Palestine and a discussion of his role in encouraging and then protecting the Iron Guard in Romania. [59] In retrospect, this trace can at best be described as sloppy. The CIA sent information from only its field stations, along with what was readily available at headquarters; no one bothered to check the captured German records in the old torpedo factory in Alexandria, Virginia, to ensure that the CIA knew all that it could about him. [60]

Evidence of the connection between Bolschwing and Eichmann might not have automatically disqualified Bolschwing, but it would have raised hard questions about his truthfulness, since he continued to conceal his prewar service in the Jewish Affairs Department. Critchfield knew, and there was no dispute, that Bolschwing had advised and then assisted the perpetrators of the pogrom of Bucharest. Had the hint of war criminality been a litmus test of sorts for the CIA, this alone would have disqualified Bolschwing. The information about Eichmann, however, could have awakened the CIA to the fact that Bolschwing was a liar who was as unreliable about the present as he was about his own past. In September 1949, Bolschwing had written an autobiography for the CIA that did not mention his having worked for the SD's Jewish Affairs Department in the 1930s. [61] The field representatives did not push very hard to uncover unfavorable information on Bolschwing; they needed him to achieve operational changes in Austria. Meanwhile, CIA headquarters was too busy or too uninterested to task anyone to do some digging in the files.

Even without the Eichmann material, the CIA knew that Bolschwing was notorious enough that he might become an embarrassment if some precautions were not taken. Bolschwing had never been formally denazified by a German or Austrian court. He was still maintaining that he had never actually joined the Party. Banking on his interrogator's assumptions about his previous life as a Prussian aristocrat, Bolschwing concocted a story that he had paid his brother's butler, who was a member of the Nazi Party, to retroactively make him a member back to 1932. The CIA in Pullach knew that Bolschwing's BDC file effectively discredited this story. These files showed that he was a formal member of the SS and had even been a formal member of the RSHA, which supervised his work in Romania.

The CIA station in Pullach decided that the BDC file had to be cleansed to prevent outsiders from using this information to undermine Bolschwing's position. In late 1949, Bolschwing claimed an expertise in Austrian politics and seemed to be viewing that as the next area for political action. [62] Early in 1950, the Austrian government was starting to ask questions about Bolschwing's status in the country. [63] Despite some misgivings on the part of the CIA chief in Berlin, Critchfield received the support of CIA headquarters and the incriminating files were removed from the BDC. [64] If the Austrians or even another U.S. agency asked for traces on the man, they were to be told that there was "no file available." [65]

In lieu of attempting to stop him from cleansing the Bolschwing files, one of Crirchfield's colleagues in the field cautioned:

At the end of the war we tried to be very smart and changed the name[s] of several members of the SD and Abwehr in order to protect them from the German authorities and the occupation authorities. In most cases these persons were so well known that the change in name compromised them more than if they were to face a denazification court and face the judgment which would have been meted out to them. In the meantime, the developments in Germany and probably also in Austria have been such that membership in the SS, or in the SD, or in the Abwehr no longer is regarded as a strike against any personality. Since I regard it impossible to keep secret such associations, except in cases where a person was a clandestine agent of a given organization, I request you to reassess the advisability of withholding information available in the Berlin Documents Center. [66]

The moment the CIA acted to whitewash Bolschwing's past, this Nazi war criminal gained enormous leverage over the U.S. government. Given that he had worked for a wholly owned subsidiary of U.S. intelligence for two years, Bolschwing was already a potential disposal problem. But the fact that support was now coming directly from the CIA meant that Bolschwing could one day become a major political problem if not managed carefully.

NAZI WAR CRIMES DISCLOSURE ACT

Declassified and Approved for Release by the Central Intelligence Agency

[Handwritten Note: Who requested this? This may have been the beginning of all our difficulty.]

Cable suggesting that Austrian prosecutors be told that there is "no file available" on Bolschwing. Someone at the CIA headquarters jotted, "Who requested this? This may have been the beginning of all our difficulty." CIA Pullach to Special Operations, Action Berlin, 18 Jan. 1950, NA, RG 263, Otto von Bolschwing Name File.

In an attempt to remove any misgivings at the stations in Berlin or Karlsruhe over hiding Bolschwing's SS personnel records, Richard Helms, the chief of German operations in Washington, had explained to the field that the secret had to be kept at least until August 1950: "Consider it essential [that] Usage [a Bolschwing code name] maintain [his] present position and freedom of movement. [The] [d]ecision to withhold or release Berlin file must be based [on] the consideration [of] which action [is] least likely restrict his activities [for the] next ninety days." [67]

Critchfield himself cabled to Washington in April that "[I] feel we should go [to] any length to help Usage." [68] Yet within a few months, Critchfield had evidently tired of Bolschwing. [69] The CIA Name File is silent on what Helms and Critchfield had expected to happen by August 1950, but whatever it was, it did not happen. [70] By mid-1951 Pullach had transferred Bolschwing to the responsibility of the CIA in Austria. "There appears to be little hope," Critchfield concluded in 1951, "that he will ever develop into a first-class agent." [71]

For CIA Austria, this second-class agent was now expected to revive the Iron Guard networks that he had once tended for the Gehlen Organization. Gehlen had closed the Romania networks in November 1951, perhaps under U.S. pressure, leaving the field wide open to the United States. [72] In January 1952, CIA headquarters authorized operational clearance for CIA Austria to use Bolschwing as a principal agent. [73]

Despite consistently underperforming as a reports officer and case officer, Bolschwing continued to be promoted. Part of the problem was that the people he encountered had little knowledge of Austria or Romania and therefore had no way of evaluating his material. Thus, the chief CIC intelligence officer James Milano, who saw what Bolschwing had given Gehlen, could tell Critchfield in all honesty that Bolschwing wrote the "best reports available [to the] USFA [United States Forces, Austria]." [74]

The last phase of the Bolschwing story holds an additional surprise. In 1953, a year into its new contract with Bolschwing, CIA Austria decided that it was time to close down his Romanian networks. But instead of merely firing him, the CIA station did something unimaginable. It chose to reward this incompetent by helping him achieve his long-term goal: the CIA decided to help him become a U.S. citizen. [75]

The CIA's continuing unwillingness to declassify operational details of the work done by the Nazi SS officers whom it employed after the war makes it difficult to determine the exact reasons for CIA Austria's blunder. Scattered comments in the declassified record suggest that Bolschwing had once again managed to convince some intelligence officers that he was a great political operative. In July 1953, CIA Austria recommended to Washington that Bolschwing be given U.S. citizenship so that he could return to Austria as a CIA officer. [76] Washington agreed with half of these recommendations. The CIA believed that U.S. citizenship was appropriate payment for "six years['] service" to the nation, [77] but unless "[a] more specific plan [were] presented for future work upon return to Austria," Washington thought it was time to cut Bolschwing loose. [78]

The ease with which Bolschwing managed to enter the United States warrants a study of its own. At root, the Department of Justice, which oversaw the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), knowingly violated U.S. law to permit Bolschwing to enter the United States. The McCarran Act of 1950 excluded from the United States any immigrants who were Communists or who belonged to organizations deemed a threat to U.S. public security. In light of its obligations under the McCarran Act, the INS initially balked at granting the visa, but when the CIA asked that the INS "waive [its] objections," the INS did so and granted the visa. [79] "His entry was in effect accomplished," a CIA internal review of its files on the case later concluded, "by the CIA statement that his services on our behalf were of a such a nature as to override his otherwise undesirable background as defined by the McCarran Act." [80]

Bolschwing's membership in the Nazi Party and his wartime SD work in Bucharest were well-known facts among those helping him to become a U.S. citizen; the only real skeleton in Bolschwing's closet was his prewar work with Eichmann in the Jewish Department. For seven years he had managed to work with various American groups without the Eichmann question being posed. He had written documents for Mildenstein, Himmler, and Eichmann that would have immediately betrayed his true face. But until 1953, no U.S. intelligence official had ever bothered to ask him about Eichmann, let alone look for those documents.

As the Agency was pressuring the INS to bring Bolschwing into the country, some final checking by CIA Austria turned up two agent reports that placed Bolschwing in Eichmann's office before the war. [81] Of course, had CIA Austria asked headquarters to check with the archivists at the torpedo factory, the mystery would have been solved immediately. But checks on Bolschwing continued to be half-hearted. The CIA team in Austria had already decided to help Bolschwing become an American. Nevertheless, this serious lead had to be followed, so Bolschwing underwent what appears to have been a polygraph. Finally asked whether he had known Eichmann, Bolschwing lied and said he had met him only twice. [82] Bolschwing's effort at deception was detected, but the administrator of the test decided to explain the entire thing away. The conclusion: Bolschwing was hiding only "a minor point," and it could be left at that. [83]

Thus, Bolschwing became a U.S. citizen. His work for the CIA ended the moment he left Austria, and the idea that he could become a political analyst of sorts died with his operational clearance. But Bolschwing refused to melt away. After working menial jobs for a short while, he parlayed his language skills and his charm into employment at the pharmaceutical company Warner Lambert, ultimately becoming assistant to the vice president in charge of foreign exports. [84] His interest in playing politics had not dimmed, however. By 1961, he was seeking a position with the predecessor of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Having cultivated some politicians in New Jersey, Bolschwing got himself nominated to a State Department post in India. [85]

When Israel and the U.S. Justice Department did not go after him in 1960, Bolschwing thought the secret of his supporting role in the Nazi persecution of the Jews was safe. The CIA, however, understood that Bolschwing was a major problem. In 1961, at the height of the Eichmann trial, the CIA explained to him that although he had lied about his role in the persecution of the Jews, the CIA would not turn him in to the U.S. Department of Justice or to the West Germans. [86] He had become a potential political embarrassment, and the CIA wanted to hide its role in bringing him to the United States. However, Bolschwing was told that if questions were raised, the CIA would not lie on his behalf. The CIA did make one request of Bolschwing. [87] He was advised not to pursue the U.S. government job in India, and he complied. As a result of this understanding, it was not until the early 1980s that Bolschwing would finally be exposed by the Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations as the war criminal that he had long been. He was denaturalized but avoided deportation. He was already suffering from a terminal illness at the time of his denaturalization and was allowed to die in the United States in 1982.

Unlike Otto von Bolschwing, Theodor Saevecke did not try to hide from his CIA handlers the fact that he was a committed Nazi. The initial phase in the relationship between Saevecke and the U.S. government remains unclear, despite new releases under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. Declassified CIA documents suggest that Saevecke was recruited by what became the CIA's Berlin Base (Kubark Berlin). The date of the recruitment is unknown; however, there is an indication that as early as 1946 Saevecke was under the protection of U.S. intelligence and that he was assisted in avoiding a British prison sentence for war crimes in 1947.

Born in 1911 in Hamburg, Saevecke joined the Nazi Party in 1929. He brought with him two years of experience as a teenage member of the Freikorps Rossbach, a paramilitary organization that terrorized German citizens in the Weimar Republic. After a stint in the German Navy, he became a criminal commissar, a Kripo (Criminal Police) officer in the storied Hanseatic League city of Lubeck with the mission of fighting "Jewish and Marxist" influences there. [88] He later moved to Berlin in the name capacity. At the start of the war, he was reassigned to the Sipo (Security Police) in Poznan, Poland, where he remained until June 1940. During this period he served at a concentration camp near Poznan, where he was one of three individuals authorized to approve executions of Poles, Russians, Gypsies, and Jews. [89] Returning to Berlin later that year, Saevecke remained two years before once again being sent out, this time to North Africa.

It was in Tunisia that Saevecke's SS career took off. He came under the wing of Walter Rauff, an SS Major who helped perfect the Sauerwagen, the execution trucks in which people were killed through the rerouting of carbon monoxide from the engine's exhaust. Rauff took to the younger Saevecke, who shared his intense dislike for Jews and his commitment to National Socialism. [90] When the November 1942 Allied invasion of North Africa prompted the Nazis to wrest control over the crumbling French North African empire, Rauff organized the SD team in Tunisia into an Einsatzkommando. The Jews of the area, who had enjoyed a mild immunity from persecution, witnessed a dramatic change in their treatment. Rauff used Saevecke to round up Jews for forced labor. About a hundred died as a result of mistreatment or murder. Saevecke's next port of call was southern Italy, where he served only a month before the Allied landings at Salerno in September forced him north to Milan. Once again he served under Rauff, this time as second in command with direct administrative responsibility for the Kripo and the Gestapo.

In northern Italy, Saevecke committed innumerable war crimes. As head of the Sipo and SD in Milan, he personally supervised the rounding up of Italian resistance fighters. When some resistance fighters killed an SS officer in the village of Corbetta, he took ten of his men to the village. There, they picked up three men, none of whom confessed but each of whom they shot. The next day, Saevecke accompanied Rauff and a group of twenty SS men and a hundred Italian collaborators to Corbetta. They surrounded the village and ordered the entire male population into the town square. Five men were chosen and shot in front of the rest. The dwellings of these men were then burned to the ground. [91] In Milan, following repeated acts of sabotage by the resistance, Saevecke selected fifteen political prisoners at random and they were all publicly shot in the city's Piazza Loreto. [92] Saevecke's cruelty also extended to the local Jewish population. He supervised the deportation of at least seven hundred Jews from the region to the extermination camps in the East. In the last months of the war, when more politically versatile men were trying to wash their hands of any role in the Final Solution, Saevecke was still using his authority to press for additional deportations. After discovering that an SS group from Trieste was bartering with Jews to save them, Saevecke had his SS colleagues punished, despite the fact that it was April 1945 and the war was essentially over. [93]

Saevecke did not try to hide from his American captors in late April 1945 that he was in the SD. [94] Although he was careful not to mention any responsibility for killing Jews, he did claim that he had been justified in killing Italian resistance fighters, all of whom he considered Communists. Under interrogation, he told the stories of Corbetta and the Piazza Loreto. Rauff also revealed under interrogation his deputy's specific responsibilities. [95]

At this point Saevecke came under the protection of U.S. intelligence. After somehow managing to leave U.S. internment, he turned up in Berlin, where he was recruited as agent "Cabanjo" by what would become the CIA's Berlin base. [96] Whatever he did was very well regarded. In a brief but heavily redacted discussion of his work, the CIA credited him with at least one major recruitment. The CIA knew that he was an unreconstructed Nazi with a dangerous past. "Saevecke still hankers back after the days when the Party was in the saddle," wrote one of his CIA handlers. "He is convinced that the principles of National Socialism were sound." [97] Nevertheless, Saevecke was considered a very useful intelligence asset. He was the only member of his CIA team "with practical intelligence experience," and his "comprehension of [U.S.] intelligence objectives" was described to headquarters as "complete and settled." [98]

Saevecke's immunity from prosecution for war crimes was first tested in 1947. He was spotted by the British, who wanted him for a murder committed in Italy. United States intelligence was unable to prevent his extradition to the British zone in early October, but a finger was placed on the scale of justice to protect agent Saevecke. [99] Just a month later he was released as "of no further interest to British War Crimes Group, S.E. Europe." [100] In his defense, Saevecke wrote that he had never belonged to the SS, claiming only to have been a simple police officer in Berlin throughout the war. Although it was the British who had overseen SS-Captain Saevecke's interrogation in Italy in June 1945, the British War Crimes Commission released Saevecke. The Commission asserted that he "did not fall under the Nuremberg judgment" because he had never belonged to any organization deemed criminal by the international tribunal. [101] But at Nuremberg the SS had in fact been so designated. Clearly, there had been a whitewash. Saevecke would soon be working for the CIA.

United States intelligence certainly knew that Saevecke had been involved in war crimes. In 1950, for example, the CIA in Karlsruhe reported to Berlin that besides being chief of the Sipo and SD Aussenkommando in Milan, something CIA Berlin had already suspected, Saevecke had earlier been "concerned with the recruitment of Jews for forced labor" as assistant to the notorious Walter Rauff in Tunisia. [102]

Saevecke's role as a U.S. asset changed in the early I950s. Initially, neither Saevecke nor the CIA thought that he could return to working for a German police force. "[Saevecke] realizes that his chances of ever getting back into the German civil service are exceedingly slim," wrote CIA Karlsruhe in August 1951, "[however,] he is grateful to us for having provided him with an opportunity of making a decent living in a position akin to his former job." [103] Yet an opportunity arose for him to join the West German federal police service through the freie Mitarbeiter system, a covert program designed to secure the employment of former SS personnel by skirting the formal channels of the German civil service. In 1952 or 1953, Saevecke became such an employee for the Federal Criminal Police Service (BKA). [104] Declassified CIA records indicate that a sizeable number of former Gestapo officials were employed by the West German government in this way. [105] These men -- who included other veterans of Gestapo operations in Poland besides Saevecke -- were paid off the books until they could be transferred to regular government employment. By 1953, Saevecke had risen to be chief of the "Operational Group" of the Sicherheitsgruppe (Security Group) of the BKA in Bonn. This former Gestapo officer was now responsible for the investigation of espionage, treason, and political crimes in a democratic Germany.

Saevecke was a ticking time bomb for the Allies. With state sovereignty not yet returned to the West Germans, the fact that this war criminal was in a position of wide authority in the "new" German federal police was a potential source of enormous political embarrassment. The CIA's decision to turn a blind eye to the freie Mitarbeiter system that had furthered not only Saevecke's but other Nazis' postwar careers, added to the dangers. In 1953, the chief of the CIA's Berlin base wrote somewhat defensively that "[Saevecke] disavows all part in atrocities, and painstaking Allied investigations [have] failed to buttress charges to the contrary." The CIA officer added that Saevecke still refused to apologize for his harsh treatment of Italian partisans. "[T]o him partisans were Communists and those Allied services which supported them were woefully misguided. There is no sense in arguing this point with him, especially since history may prove him right." Fearing that Washington might doubt his own political philosophy because of his continued commitment to Saevecke, the CIA's Berlin chief explained that though he knew Saevecke to be a hardened Nazi, "in discussing Nazism, a topic best avoided, I don't feel any compulsion to humor Subject. I have never made intellectual sacrifices in voicing my opinions about the creed and its representatives, about SS, SD, and RSHA and concentration camps." [106]

A year later, Saevecke came under scrutiny for the second time in his CIA career, this time because of the partisan issue. Some Italians claimed that he had committed war crimes in their country, and they sought his arrest. Sensitive to the bad press that this represented, and hopeful that the rest of the world would see the hiring of Saevecke as the exception not the rule, the West German Ministry of the Interior suspended him from the BKA and launched an investigation. [107]

The CIA tried to help Saevecke. It pulled together its file on the helpful British whitewash of November 1947 and sent those documents to the West Germans. As the case lingered, CIA headquarters noted that "it was hard to see how [Saevecke] can escape [the] onus for brutal interrogations in Milan. Doubtless [Saevecke's] role in [the] Einsatzkommando in North Africa supervising deportation [of] Jews to Germany will be noted." [108] The Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, could not recall Saevecke, who claimed that he had helped the OSS end the war early in northern Italy, but headquarters was prepared to assist him if possible: "Our attitude on [Saevecke] will depend on how bad he really was. If his past [is] in any way defensible, we will pass [to the West Germans] summary reports with our opinion [that] Cabanjo [is] politically suitable. If not, we will keep out." [109] Washington even held out the possibility of maintaining a relationship with Saevecke should the West Germans decide they had to fire him. "If Cabanjo [is] bounced," it was suggested, "[the CIA] may want [to] stake him to [a] private detective agency as insurance against rightist resurgence in [the] future." [110]

In the meantime, Saevecke was told not to reveal that he had CIA backing. Washington was afraid that its efforts to exonerate him would fail if Bonn understood that the United States was trying to keep one of its moles in the West German security system. "[This] may queer the whole plan," Washington noted. [111]

Chief [DELETE], Bonn

Chief, Berlin [DELETE]

[DELETE]

[DELETE]

8 January 1953

[DELETE]

2. Subject is a former high ranking SS officer, who occupied positions of great trust and importance under the aegis of the RSHA.

[DELETE]

3. Subject's last position was that of chief of the Sieberheitedienst in Milano under the Hochate SS and Polizeifuhrer OLFF (whose guts he hates). He was a close friend of SS Standartenfuhrer KAPPLAN, SD chief in Rome, who took the rap for the execution of 300 hostages in a cave near Rome.

4. Subject took a very prominent part in warfare waged by the German security service against Italian partisans during 1944 and 1945. He has no apologies to make for what he did; to him partisans were Communists and those Allied services which supported them were woefully misguided. There is no sense in arguing this point with him, especially since history may prove him right.

5. Subject disavows all part in atrocities, and painstaking Allied investigations have failed to buttress charges to the contrary. There are some indications, in fact, that Subject made many Italian friends, not necessarily in sympathy with Fascism. In "Operation Sunrise" he played a marginal role.

glp:bjt

Distribution:

2 Bonn

3 [DELETE]

3 [Illegible]

1 [DELETE]

6. Subject's hatred of communism is unfeigned. He is a calm and rather unemotional individual. This should not deceive you as to the intensity of his feelings about communism. It is an elementary, wearing, and completely unreasoning loathing and while he may pay lip service to the due processes of law, he would undoubtedly shrink from nothing in suppressing that movement. I have seldom come closer to an agent in whose anti-communism I would depose complete trust. His adherence to concepts of western democracy is skin deep. He likes and respects Americans, seeing in them the strongest bulwark against communist expansionism.

[DELETE]

[DELETE]

10. In discussing Naziism, a topic best avoided, don't feel any compulsion to humor Subject. I have never made intellectual sacrifices in voicing my opinions about the creed and its representatives, about SS, SD, and RSHA and concentration camps. [DELETE] He knows that it needed a lot of persuading on the part of [DELETE] to make us accept him as a "Mitarbeiter".

11. Subject is a North German prototype study, tough, proud, reliable, with a salty sense of humor. He spent his youth and formative years, sailing the seven seas on a schooner under the flag of the famed Leitz Line, owners of a fleet of boats which plied between Hamburg and Chile, carrying saltpeter. He loves to collect all sorts of knick knacks connected with sail boats, and at heart he will always remain a sailor.

[DELETE]

Approved by:

A three-page memorandum released by the CIA under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 in which a CIA officer writes of Theodor Saevecke: "Subject took a very prominent part in warfare waged by the German security service against Italian partisans during 1944 and 1945 ... He knows that it needed a lot of persuading on the part of [excised] to make us accept him as a "Mitarbeiter."

Although it would take until 1955, Saevecke was cleared for lack of sufficient evidence linking him to war crimes. CIA Frankfurt later took credit for saving Saevecke's job and perhaps keeping him out of prison. "We were able to provide from Amer[ican] files, a body of Info[rmation] which helped serve to exonerate him from the charges ... That information was passed direct[ly] to the Ministry of [the] Interior." [112]

The capture of Eichmann ushered in a new crisis for Saevecke. It was inevitable that the trial in Jerusalem, which revived general interest in the punishment of Nazi war criminals, would once more cast the harsh light of scrutiny on Theo Saevecke. In 1963, Saevecke became the subject of critical press stories. He asked the CIA, through a Sicherheitsgruppe official, to determine who had asked for information about his Nazi background. Uncertain that it could pass on this information to him, the CIA nevertheless decided to track down who was trying to discredit Saevecke. [113] The CIA's concerns had shifted since the mid-1950s. The recent case of Heinz Felfe, a former SD officer and postwar Gehlen counterespionage chief who had been recruited by the KGB, increased concerns that the other Nazi war criminals hired by the West might have fallen victim to Soviet counterespionage. Agency officials now began to ask themselves how someone who had committed crimes in Poland could have resisted notice by the Soviets in the Cold War game of spy versus spy.

The CIA watched carefully as Saevecke came under scrutiny, this time for his wartime actions in Tunisia. When East German newspapers joined the chorus of disapproval, Saevecke's bona fides as a true-blue Western agent seemed to be established. This time, the Agency took a less direct role in ensuring that he survived the investigation. When Saevecke escaped prosecution in 1964, again for lack of evidence pinning him to a particular Jewish murder, the CIA noted that Saevecke had reached an agreement with his West German employers. He would maintain a low profile for another seven years until he was eligible for retirement from the civil service at the age of 60. [114] And this is what happened. The retired policeman, who lived to enjoy a West German pension, died of old age in 1988.

Erich Rajakowitsch

Erich Rajakowitsch had taken as his life's mission the use of the law to rid the German people of all Jews. Born in Trieste in the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Rajakowitsch dreamed of union with Germany to restore Austria's former greatness. After completing his legal training at the University of Graz in the Austrian province of Styria, he went to Vienna where he joined the underground Nazi movement.

Rajakowitsch was a lawyer in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss. Like Bolschwing, Rajakowitsch had thought about measures to limit the economic sphere of Jews in Austria. Rajakowitsch and his ideas soon came to the attention of Adolf Eichmann, who was impressed. Rajakowitsch, Eichmann wrote, is "somebody who puts himself ar the disposal of the cause with heart and soul, a National Socialist of the purest race." [115]

Once the war began, Rajakowitsch was drafted and served with the SS in Poland before becoming chief of the Sipo and SD office in Prague. Transferring in December 1939 to the RSHA, the headquarters of the SS intelligence service, he stayed in Berlin until April 1941. [116] At that time, Eichmann sent him to occupied Holland to be his representative in the Hague. Berlin believed it was losing control of the internal situation in Holland and wanted to manage Jewish affairs separately from general occupation matters. A general strike had broken out among dock workers in February, and there was increasing resistance among Dutch Jews to the introduction of anti-Jewish measures. Rajakowitsch was among those sent to help restore some order in the management of the "Jewish problem" in Holland. [117] In May 1941, all Nazis responsible for Jewish affairs in Holland met to begin preparing for the expropriation of Jewish property so that it could be "placed at the disposal of the financing of the Final Solution." [118] The concentration of Dutch Jews in half a dozen camps around the Netherlands began in January 1942. Four months later, Dutch Jews were ordered to wear the Yellow Star of David. On June 11, 1942, along with Eichmann's representatives in Paris and Brussels, Rajakowitsch participated in a meeting where it was decided that in the first phase of extermination 15,000 Jews would be deported to the death camps from Holland, 10,000 from Belgium, and 100,000 from France. [119] The first trains carrying Dutch Jews left for Auschwitz on July 15, 1942. [120] On August 12, 1942, Rajakowitsch himself cabled a message to the SS in Paris informing the office of the order to deport all Dutch Jews resident in France. [121] Within a month of receiving Rajakowitsch's message, the SS in France deported eighty-three Dutch Jews to Auschwitz, among whom were ten children, ages three to ten. [122] Rajakowitsch left the Netherlands in 1943 to attend an SS officer's school, and he spent some time on the eastern front before the war ended.

The CIC was the first U.S. agency to encounter the name Rajakowitsch. In the course of its investigation of Eichmann in 1946, the CIC developed a lead on a former mistress of Eichmann who had benefited financially from the expropriation of a factory owned by Jews in Austria. The lawyer who handled this transaction for the SS was an associate of Eichmann's named Rajakowitsch. [123] In 1947, the CIC went looking for Rajakowitsch again in connection with an Austrian request to find him to help with restitution cases initiated by Austrian citizens who had lost their properties before the war because they were Jewish. [124]

Rajakowitsch was not far away. In 1953, he came to the attention of the CIA. He was living in Milan under the name Enrico Raja or Enrico Rajakowitsch. He owned Enneri & Company, an import-export firm that controlled a significant share of the trade between Italy and Communist East Germany. [12]5 Enneri's participation in the export of mercury to Czechoslovakia -- mercury was considered a strategic material -- led to the placement of Rajakowitsch and Enneri on a U.S. government watch list in January 1954. [126] From Italian sources, the CIA learned that in business Rajakowitsch was "a man of few scruples who is capa[ble] of going into any activity if it is worth his while." [127] But the CIA concluded there was no evidence that he was a political threat of any kind and seemed to have no curiosity about what this middle-aged man had done during the war. The CIA accepted at face value Rajakowitsch's statement to the Civil Police of the Free Territory of Trieste, which the Agency acquired through a liaison, that after being drafted by the German Army he had served as a simple soldier on the eastern front. [128] Despite its continuing interest in this man, the CIA neither requested a check of the SS personnel files at the Berlin Documents Center nor requested possible traces on him from the U.S. Army, which had first investigated Rajakowitsch in 1946.

Despite his role as Eichmann's representative in the Hague, Rajakowitsch had largely escaped notice when the Allies assembled lists of wanted Eichmann staff at the end of World War II. General histories of the Holocaust produced in the 1950s focused on the activities of Eichmann's principal deputy in Holland, Willem Zoepf. [129] There was no cache of neglected documents in U.S. records about Rajakowitsch. The French appear to be the only Allied power with captured materials linking Rajakowitsch to the Final Solution, and they had turned this material over to the International Center for Jewish Documentation in Paris. Consistent with its postwar policy on Nazi war crimes, the CIA never took the time to check these files for information on Rajakowitsch. [130]

Still unaware of Rajakowitsch's SS past, a CIA officer approached Rajakowitsch in Milan in June 1959 in an attempt to recruit him for work against the East Germans and the Communist Chinese. Rajakowitsch was no friend of the United States, but he was civil to the American officer. He discussed the trip he had taken to the trade fair in Canton, China, in 1958 and even handed over the visiting cards of the people he had met and talked with there. But, as described in the CIA cable summarizing this contact, "Subj[ect] was not receptive [to the] officer's efforts [to] elicit his cooperation in accepting specific questions prior [to] his next trip [to] Canton in [19]59." [131] From the heavily redacted materials, it appears that the CIA remained intensely interested in Rajakowitsch's ongoing commercial relationship with the Eastern Bloc. Rajakowitsch had turned down the offer to cooperate; so the CIA instead used an unnamed foreign businessman to indirectly monitor Rajakowitsch's activities and penetrate his trading relationship with the Eastern Bloc. Given the redactions in available documents, however, the nature and scope of the CIA's indirect link to Rajakowitsch in the early 1960s remains unclear.

The Eichmann trial forced the CIA to consider Rajakowitsch in a different light. In May 1962, the Agency learned from the State Department that the Austrian government had sent the Israelis a list of questions on Erich Rajakowitsch to ask Eichmann before his execution. [132] The next month, presumably, the West German government requested whatever the CIA had on Rajakowitsch. The West Germans described him as a former SS officer who had served in Holland. His wartime SS superior in Holland, Wilhelm Harster, had even once recommended Rajakowitsch to the Gehlen Organization as an agent, though apparently he had not been hired. The CIA now assumed that Enrico Rajakowitsch of Milan was probably identical with this Rajakowitsch who had been in the SS. [133]

Eichmann refused to testify against his old colleague Rajakowitsch. [134] Nevertheless, the CIA told its indirect contact to Rajakowitsch in early 1963 to "disengage" from him. Rajakowitsch had previously given the foreign businessman 30,000 Swiss francs to invest, and at the request of the CIA, its agent returned this money to Rajakowitsch. [135]

In mid-1962, the famous Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal announced that he was looking for Rajakowitsch. [136] By the spring of 1963, the European press had taken an interest in him. Fearful that the Italians would throw him out, especially as stories about him appeared in the Italian press, Rajakowitsch left for Switzerland on April 9, 1963. He told a CIA informant that he had millions of Swiss francs on deposit there and a villa in one of the southern cantons. [137] The Swiss, however, were not very welcoming. Within a few days, Rajakowitsch determined he had no real option other than to take his chances on Austrian justice. In mid-April he crossed the border and turned himself in to the Austrian police.

Rajakowitsch had some hope that he might be fully exonerated. [138] Karl Silberbaum, the Gestapo officer who had arrested Anne Frank, the most famous victim of the Nazi persecution of the Dutch Jews, had been found not guilty by an Austrian court. [139] In that case, the Court had accepted the argument that this man was not a war criminal because he had had no idea where Anne Frank and her relatives were being taken.

The CIA did not place any bets on the length of Rajakowitsch's jail time, but it seems to have had an interest in eventually letting him resume his East-West commercial activities in Italy. In December 1964, someone, perhaps even a CIA officer, approached the Italian authorities to see whether Rajakowitsch would be allowed to return to Italy. Once Rome agreed, the Agency planned for the likelihood that Rajakowitsch would be able to continue his activities. "As a matter of information," a CIA officer cabled in December 1964, "should Raja be freed by the Austrians, [a foreign official] plans to debrief Raja under a [code word] and in [redacted] home. [140]

As Rajakowitsch had hoped, the Austrian justice system protected him. Although Rajakowitsch stayed in an Austrian jail perhaps longer than he had expected, he ultimately received a light sentence. He was sentenced to two and a half years, but the duration of the trial was considered time served. The court found the evidence that Rajakowitsch had ordered the deportation of eighty-three Dutch Jews from France to the death camps as insufficient to charge him with anything other than "having with malicious forethought created a situation which brought about danger of life for human beings and which resulted in their death." [141] Following this slap on the wrist, Rajakowitsch returned to Milan. In spite of all that it now knew about Rajakowitsch's role in the Holocaust, the CIA attempted to restore contact with him. Knowing that the anti-American Rajakowitsch would not willingly work for the United States, the Agency opted to use a false-flag recruitment to gain Rajakowitsch's assistance. [142] In March 1966, an unnamed foreign service requested an unnamed individual to get Rajakowitsch to

prepare a list of names connected with the Communist world with whom he had had commercial rapport. Subject has promised to furnish [redacted] additional documentation, however, Subject would have to consult his notes at home and office in Milan. Subject said that he could not trust his memory in compiling such a listing. Subject also made known to [redacted] that he would also add numerous names of persons to this listing who are openly regarded as Communists and are, instead, pro-West. Subject made it known that this latter listing should be treared with the utmost secrecy. [143]

Rajakowitsch was not to be told that the CIA was his ultimate consumer. Although it is likely that this indirect contact continued, the publicly available CIA records are silent on what happened to Rajakowitsch after 1966. It is likely he escaped full punishment for his war crimes.

Aleksandras Lileikis

Aleksandras Lileikis was the Sipo chief in Vilnius during the German occupation. [144] After the war, he turned up as a displaced person in a camp in Bamberg, Germany. He came to the attention of the CIC in May 1947, when he was identified as "chief of the Lithuanian political security police in Vilna [Vilnius] during the German occupation, and ... possibly connected with the shooting of Jews in Vilna." [145] The CIC had poor records on Lithuanian collaborators, and the 930th CIC Detachment could find no evidence that he was on any "wanted" lists. The 930th CIC referred the case to higher authority. Apparently, the Office of the Chief Counsel for War Crimes had equally poor records on Lithuanian war criminals. In June 1947, the CIC was informed that the Office had no interest in Lileikis.

Lileikis had relatives in the United States and wanted to emigrate here. In 1950 he applied for a U.S. visa for the first time. The U.S. Displaced Persons Commission, which received a report on his wartime activities from the CIC, unanimously rejected him, arguing that men in authority in the Sipo were there "because of their known Nazi sympathies."

In 1952, contact was established between the Munich base of the CIA and Lileikis. The declassified CIA records are silent on how or by whom Lileikis approached U.S. intelligence. The materials indicate, however, that the CIA was fully aware of the derogatory information that had prevented the Displaced Persons Commission from granting Lileikis a visa. In August 1952, CIA Munich asked CIA headquarters to approve the use of Lileikis in Germany. In November, Agency officers checked CIC records at Fort Holabird and noted that Lileikis had commanded the Sipo in Vilna and had possibly been responsible for the deaths of many Jews there. Nevertheless, on March 5, 1953, headquarters granted an operational clearance to use Lileikis. At the time, Lileikis was described as a member of the Lithuanian National Union.

If viewed in a vacuum, the decision to hire as a simple recruiter someone who had probably killed many innocent human beings might seem inexplicable. But when viewed next to the cases of Bolschwing, Saevecke, and Rajakowitsch, a pattern emerges of CIA callousness in the mid-1950s to the issue of justice and the Holocaust. War criminality did not bring automatic disqualification for recruitment, however heinous the crime. As interest ebbed in finding Eichmann, the need to be careful about hiring his associates disappeared.

Like most every other Nazi war criminal hired by the CIA, Lileikis was a failure in the field. Lileikis did not even want to play spy. [146] Instead, he sought to exploit the CIA's interest in him and get the Agency to whitewash his past so that he could join his family in the United States. In 1955, apparently without CIA sponsorship, Lileikis once again applied for a U.S. visa. The CIA, which wanted to keep him in Germany for operational reasons, gave negative information about him to the State Department. Yet, for some unknown reason, this time he was granted a U.S. visa. In response, the CIA terminated its "oral agreement" with Lileikis for work in Germany, but it retained its operational clearance for him, presumably in case he proved useful in the United States. The CIA indeed remained interested in him. He was observed at Lithuanian emigre conventions, and when the INS sought to hire Lileikis as an informant in the Lithuanian community in 1956, the CIA told the DOJ that it retained an interest in the man. In July 1957, the operational clearance for Lileikis was formally terminated. The Soviet Division of the CIA's Directorate of Operations noted in making this decision that, having immigrated to the United States, Lileikis is "no longer of operational use to this branch."

Lileikis would ultimately become a U.S. citizen. The Eichmann trial seems to have had no effect on the way he conducted his life. Only in the 1990s would he be discovered by the DOJ Office of Special Investigations and denaturalized for his role in committing crimes against humanity. He died in Lithuania in 2000 while on trial.

What did the Recruitment of Nazi War Criminals Achieve?

In an interview in 1991, Richard Helms explained that the CIA had never prevented its field stations from recruiting members of the SS, despite the Nuremberg judgment that it was a criminal organization. [147] He did not specifically include participants in the persecution of the Jews, but the recently declassified material makes startlingly clear that the CIA did not consider even this level of criminality a bar from recruitment. As dramatized by these five cases, in its zeal to collect information on the Soviet Bloc, the CIA chose to overlook the Nazi past of an agent. In the cases of Bolschwing, Saevecke, and Lileikis, the Agency hired the war criminal despite ample evidence that they were probably responsible for war crimes. In the case of Rajakowitsch, though recruitment did not happen because the war criminal himself refused, the CIA sought at least an indirect contact even after the Eichmann disclosures. Mildenstein was the only one who was not actively recruited, though it is not clear that his past was what prevented his recruitment. The CIA's central concern was nor so much the extent of the criminal's guilt as the likelihood that the agent's criminal past could remain a secret.

And what was the value of these contacts? In return, the CIA got very little. Bolschwing was as incompetent an agent for CIA Austria as he had been for CIA Pullach, for the Gehlen Otganization, and even for the SD itself. Lileikis appears to have had little interest in spying; but the lure of U.S. protection kept him in the game for two years. Of the five, only Saevecke was ultimately considered a worthwhile asset by the CIA and, given the lack of information available on what he achieved, even that tepid assessment is in doubt.

What were the costs of these Faustian deals? With the exception of the Bolschwing case, which received media attention in the late 1970s and 1980s, the role of the CIA in the postwar careers of these men remained a secret until after their deaths. But the absence of political embarrassment -- made possible because the CIA withheld important information even from U.S. law enforcement agencies -- does not mean that the hiring of war criminals lacked a corrosive effect. The whitewashing of Bolschwing's file was dismaying to a number of CIA officers in the field in Germany and made the Agency vulnerable to Bolschwing's need for protection later on. The Saevecke case involved the United States in a West German scheme to hide at least a dozen Gestapo officers who were given covert jobs in the postwar German police, which opened the West to Soviet propaganda and possibly to penetration by Soviet intelligence. Evidence on the freie Mitarbeiter, whose existence is revealed in the IWG material fot the first time, is fragmentary; due to the lack of documentation here and in the former Soviet Bloc, the extent of Soviet penetration of that group remains unknown. The corrosive effect that Lileikis may have had on the postwar Lithuanian community in the United States is difficult to judge, but the presence of this mass murderer in the general population sent a signal to fellow veterans of the secret police in Nazi-occupied Lithuania that Cold War America was forgiving of these murders. The full extent of Lileikis' role in recruiting his colleagues in Germany and perhaps helping them to come to the United States cannot yet be determined.

These five were the most telling cases of CIA recruitment of Nazi war criminals in the Cold War, but they were by no means the only ones disclosed through the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. [148] An additional twenty-one instances of the recruitment of Nazi war criminals or men with unproved but suspiciously criminal pasts highlight this troubling dimension of the early history of the CIA. There was no CIA program specifically designed to recruit Nazi war criminals. Nor was there any conspiracy to protect Hitler's willing executioners. Yet all of these cases demonstrate the mood of an era in which the rush to understand a new enemy encouraged a cynical amnesia regarding an earlier foe. More importantly, they are a stark reminder that rarely can any good result when a country's guardians divorce themselves from the morality of the people they are seeking to protect.

1. Evidence of U.S. surprise is found both in Eichmann's CIA file ( NA, RG 263, Adolf Eichmann Name File) and in his FBI file (NA, RG 65, 65-65842, box 25).

2. NA, RG 263, Adolf Eichmann Name File.

3. U.S. documents make no reference to efforts by the British, French, or Soviets to capture Eichmann in the 1950s. However, materials recently released regarding Canadian discussions with the FBI about Eichmann in the 1950s suggest that though the Canadians remained interested in finding Eichmann, there was no coordinated Allied effort. NA, RG 319, IRR, entry 134B, Adolf Eichmann (1 of 2).

6. Because it was assumed that Eichmann was in the Middle East, Kermit Roosevelt, the Chief of the Near East Division of the Directorate of Operations, oversaw what few queries were made about Eichmann. In early 1954, Roosevelt wrote, "Please bear in mind that while we are interested in the whereabouts and activities of Eichmann, it is not within the Kubark [CIA] jurisdiction to take any action in connection with his status as a war criminal." Roosevelt to Chief, [excised], 6 Jan. 1954, NA, RG 263, Adolf Eichmann Name File.

8. Memo to the Files, Henry A. Fuchs, Chief of Operations, CIC Salzburg, It July 1945, "Austrian police officials were verbally notified ... that, in general, all denazification type personalities are of no further interest to USFA inasmuch as denazification was relegated to Austrian authority. However, war criminals are to be continued on Wanted Lists until specifically recalled." Evidently CIC Salzburg had had its wrist gently slapped by suggesting that Eichmann be dropped from the watch list. NA, RG 319, IRR, entry 134B, Adolf Eichmann (1 of 2).

9. Memo for the Record, "Meeting with [excised]," 26 May 1960. The CIA officer explained that he had "specifically arranged the meeting to elicit from him whatever I could on the capture of Eichmann. Richard Helms has expressed an interest in receiving all possible details to pass to the Director;" NA, RG 263, Adolf Eichmann Name File.

10. In 1958, the West German intelligence service indicated to the CIA that it had information that Eichmann had been living in Argentina under the alias Clemens since 1952. Chief, Munich CO Chief, EE, [excised] Near Eastern Connections, 19 Mar. 1958, NA, RG 263, Adolf Eichmann Name File. From the context, it is evident that this is a reference to Gehlen [alias "Utility"] and the BND's sources in the Middle Ease. Eichmann was nor believed to be one of their sources.

11. Director to [excised], 3 June 1960; Memo for the Record, "Meeting with [excised] on 15 June 1960," NA, RG 263, Adolf Eichmann Name File. Despite the redactions, this document is clearly the record of a meeting of a CIA representative in Washington with a liaison officer from the Israeli government.

12. Memcon, "Luncheon Meeting with [excised] at Rive Gauche [excised] 1960," 1 June 1960. The CIA participant told the Israeli representative that the United States had already found documents that could help in Eichmann's prosecution; NA, RG 263, Adolf Eichmann Name File.

14. Author conversation with Robert Wolfe, July 2003. Dr. Wolfe was an archivist/historian with the Captured German Records Project in June 1960.

15. Blind Memo, "Subject: Adolf Eichmann," 15 June 1960, NA, RG 263, Adolf Eichmann Name File. It is unclear why it took this long to deliver the materials to the Israelis. By June 1, the archivists at the torpedo factory had pointed out the documents to the CIA.

16. Director to Berlin, [CI was originating unit], 24 May 1960, NA, RG 263, Adolf Eichmann Name File. This was a priority cable to be given "immediate handling" in Berlin.

17. Acting Chief, CI Staff to DCI, "Adolf Eichmann," [No Date], NA, RG 263, Otto Von Bolschwing Name File. Horton's role in replacing Angleton, who was on an extended medical leave in this period to recuperate from tuberculosis, comes from Raymond Rocca, former Deputy Chief CI Staff, interview with author, 10 Mar. 1992.

20. Franz Alfred Six was another alumnus of Department II Section 112 whose postwar employment became an issue once Eichmann was captured. Hired by the Gehlen Organization in the mid-1950s, he was only indirectly employed by the CIA. Six would ultimately become the head of Gehlen's GV-H department, though this may have occurred after the CIA ended its stewardship of the Gehlen Organization. See NA, RG 263, Franz Six Name File. On the CIA's relationship with the Gehlen Organization, see chapter 14.

29. See Friedrich Voss and Joachim Deumling Name Files, NA, RG 263. Tn 1958, the U.S. Army tried to recruit Deumling, a wartime Gestapo officer and Einsatzgruppe member in Croatia, who was then serving as an advisor to Egyptian military intelligence.

30. Memorandum for the record, 4 June [19]70 [handwritten], CI [excised]. NA, RG 263, Otto von Bolschwing Name File. This memo begins with a discussion of events in 1960. The Name of the U.S. intelligence officer contacted by Bolschwing is redacted. This person recruited Bolschwing in Austria shortly afrer the end of the war and remained a friend after Bolschwing came to the United States. The U.S. intelligence officer later joined the CI Staff in the CIA but was out of the Agency by 1960. This person may have been Colonel Ray Goggin, who had been in the CIC in Austria and may have recruited Bolschwing for the CIC. He later sponsored Bolschwing for immigration to the United States. It is nor known whether Goggin later left the U.S. Army to join the CIA, though this was a well-worn career path for CIC officers in the late 1940s.

31. Ibid.

32. See Allan Ryan, Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984) for a complete discussion of Bolschwing's SS background, the manner in which he came to United States, and his subsequent denaturalization. Ryan, who headed the OSI ar the rime the case was investigated, could nor go into any discussion of Bolschwing's intelligence career for the United States. Christopher Simpson, Blowback: Americas Recruitment of Nazis and its Effects on the Cold War (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988) was the first serious study of that aspect of the case, which successfully used materials declassified through the Freedom of Information Act to piece together some of Bolschwing's intelligence career. A fuller discussion of the CIA's relationship with Bolschwing appeared in 1998 as a classified article in the CIA's in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence. Authored by CIA historian Kevin Ruffner, the article was pathbreaking, raising operational questions hitherto only vaguely understood. The article and many of the documents consulted by Ruffner were released in 2001 under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. Unfortunately, Ruffner's article on this seminal case was redacted and his footnotes were heavily censored.

33. Eli Rosenbaum (Director, United Stares Department of Justice, Criminal Division, Office of Special Investigations), interview with author, August 2003.

38. For a useful introduction to the rebellion of Jan. 1941 and the events preceding it in Romania, see Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944, (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 43-61.

39. See 26 Feb. 1941 memorandum from Manfred von Killinger, the German Minister in Romania, to the German Foreign Ministry, "Report to the Foreign Minister regarding participation by Reich Germans in the attempted revolution by the Legionnaires," Documents of German Foreign Policy, vol. 12, 171-76. In this document, Killinger complains about Bolschwing hiding nine Iron Guardists in the legation without informing him. See also a letter from Anronescu to Killinger dated 1 March 1941 declaring Bolschwing persona non grata, NA, RG 242, T-120, roll 185, frames 89557-58. Evidence that Bolschwing saved thirteen Iron Guardisrs comes from page 5 of an undated list of available information on Bolschwing, NA, RG 263, Otto von Bolschwing Name File. See Also Ryan, Quiet Neighbors, 229-32.

45. The interrogation of Jost was sent to OSS (X-2) London as document XX-8719, where it became part of the Allied central files on German personalities in the summer of 1945. It was summarized for the CIA's station in Pullach in July 1949 as an extensive response to a trace request on Bolschwing. Undated, "Bolschwing, Alfred Otto von," NA, RG 263, Otto von Bolschwing Name File.

49. Eli Rosenbaum, interview with author, August 2003. Hottl was Bolschwing's colleague in the SD.

50. AB-43 to AB-51 [Hecksher], "Bolschwing, Otto Albrecht Alfred," 26 Mar. 1947, NA, RG 263, Otto von Bolschwing Name File. After talking to a few of the U.S. Army officers in military government who had worked with Bolschwing in Munich, CIA Heidelberg determined that Bolschwing was "unreliable and of negative character." After receiving this information from Heidelberg and apparently some from Washington, the counterespionage group at CIG Vienna (code Named "Security Control Division" in this period), decided "not to use Subject in any capacity." Security Control Division, Austria to Chief FBM [Richard Helms], 19 Apr. 1947, "Otto Albrecht Alfred Bolschwing," NA, RG 263, Otto von Bolschwing Name File. The information sent by CIA HQ to Vienna in April 1947 was not found among the released documents in the Name File. Evidence that Hecksher is AB-51 comes from NA, RG 226, entry 108A, box 287, 1wx-002-10 17b. He was chief of Security Control, AMZON, headquartered in Heidelberg [lwx-002-1017c]. In later years, James Critchfield would recall that Bolschwing was "very charming." James Critchfield, interview with author, November 2002.

58. Memo, "Unrest (Bolschwing) Files," [undated, but probably late 1949], NA, RG 263, Otto von Bolschwing Name File. The memo makes the point that having figured this goal out, Bolschwing was using it to cozy up to the CIA.

60. See Blind Memo, "Subject: Otto Albrecht Alfred von Bolschwing," 10 Apr. 1961 for evidence that the material relating to Bolschwing at the torpedo factory was seen by the CIA as a result of the hunt for documents on Eichmann, NA, RG 263, Otto von Bolschwing Name File.

62. Memo, William Philp, 1 Sept. 1949, Philp collection, the Hoover Institution. Colonel Philp discussed the future of Austria with Bolschwing, whose views garnered enormous respect from U.S. military and intelligence officials, despite the fact that Bolschwing was not Austrian and had lived there for only five years.

70. One possibility is that Helms and Critchfield were moved to protect Bolschwing because of a rare opportunity to gain Soviet cryptographic information. On the basis of interviews done in the 1980s, Mary Ellen Reese wrote that Bolschwing was involved in a CIA effort to buy Soviet ciphers in Vienna in the spring of 1950. Reese, General Reinhard Gehlen: The CIA Connection (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1990), 114-18. In Reese's account, one of Bolschwing's agents in Austria had provided the lead to the cipher material. This CIA case -- without any reference to Bolschwing -- was first mentioned in the memoirs of Peer de Silva, an officer at the CIA station in Pullach. De Silva, Sub Rosa: the CIA and the Uses of Intelligence (New York: Times Books, 1978), 42-52.

71. Ibid.

72. [Undated] Trace results, NA, RG 263, Ernest Schlandt Name File. Schlandt, a former liaison officer in the SS Arne VT-Z Ost, was also a postwar member of GV-A. It appears he was not picked up with Bolschwing.

79. Ibid. This cable provides evidence of the CIA request to INS that it break the law.

80. Blind Memo, [undated], NA, RG 263, Otto von Bolschwing Name File. Bolschwing also benefited from the good relationship that the CIA representative in Munich had with the local State Department Consular official, who was very helpful; see Chief [excised] Salzburg to Chief, EE, Arm: [excised], 14 Aug. 1953, "Grossbahn-U.S. Visa," ibid.

81. One of the remaining mysteries of this case is why the CIA did nor circumvent the INS entirely. According to the National Security Act of 1947, the Director of Central Intelligence has the right to bring up to one hundred aliens into the country per year if deemed in the national interest. Bolschwing, however, was determined to be "ineligible" for this blanket provision. No explanation was given in the file. See Cable, Director CIA to Senior Representative, Austria, 28 Aug. 1953, NA, RG 263, Otto von Bolschwing Name File.

82. A decade later Eichmann would testify to the many discussions he had had with Bolschwing about Zionism and Palestine.

89. Chief, EE to Chief, Germany and Chief, Bonn, 6 Jan. 1964, ibid. A CIA informant related the story that "Whenever one of the inmates was executed, a form notice would appear on the bulletin board with a check-mark in the square which designated death by either firing squad or hanging. These forms contained three signatures, one of which was often Saevecke's."

94. Saevecke, who appeared on page 91 of the CROWCASS list of Nazi war criminals, did not need to. Dachau Detachment 7708 War Crimes Group, 9 Sept. 1947, NA, RG 263, Theodor Saevecke Name File.

95. NA, RG 263, Walter Rauff Name File.

96. TC Hughes to CO, Hdqs. 66rh CIC Group, 19 July 1954, NA, RG 263, Theodor Saevecke Name File. This code Name would stick with him throughout his CIA career. The released materials do nor clarify exactly when Saevecke was recruited by U.S. intelligence.

104. Chief, Berlin to Chief [excised] Bonn, 8 Jan. 1953, ibid. It appears that the idea to make him a freie Mitarbeiter did nor come from the CIA. The Chief of the Berlin Base wrote in January 1953 that "it needed a lot of persuading on the part of [foreign businessman] to make us accept him as a 'Mitarbeiter.'"

117. Time, "End of the Chase," 26 Apr. 1963, ibid., vol. 2; On Jewish resistance in the Netherlands in 1941 and the Nazi response, see Leni Yahil, the Holocaust: the Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945, trans. Ina Friedman and Haya Galai (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 176. Rajakowitsch was in Eichmann's Amt IV B 4, the Jewish section of the Gestapo.

118. Yahil, Holocaust, 337-39.

119. Captured German document [French translation], Paris, 15 June 1942, NA, RG 263, Erich Rajakowitsch Name File. Rajakowitsch is not referred to by Name in the document. His attendance is assumed, given that the document refers to the fact that "those responsible for the Jewish sections in Brussels and the Hague" attended the meeting in Paris where these decisions were made.

125. The CIA Name File on Rajakowitsch contains two reports on "Enrico" Rajakowitsch (alias Enrico Raja) and the Enneri Company from Apr. 1953. A 25 Feb. 1959 list of traces mentions a 16 Feb. 1953 report on him and Enneri, but none earlier. See NA, RG 263, Erich Rajakowitsch Name File.

130. See Attachment 1, Chief [excised] to Chief [excised], 23 Dec. 1964, NA, RG 263, Erich Rajakowitsch Name File. This French-language document appears to have been generated by individuals sympathetic to Rajakowitsch. His allies argued that Rajakowitsch was too far down the chain of command to be held responsible for the extermination of the Jews of Holland and, in any case, was not likely to have known that deportation meant death. The document is useful because it discusses the provenance of the documents introduced in court by the Austrian prosecutor.

131. Cable, CIA HQ to CIA Vienna, 4 Mar. 1963, NA, RG 263, Erich Rajakowitsch Name File. Initially, information about the attempted recruitment in 1959 was redacted from the materials turned over to the IWG by the CIA. In response to an IWG request for a re-review of thirteen files, including that on Rajakowitsch, the CIA declassified a paragraph summarizing this approach, which appeared in this 4 Mar. 1963 cable to the field. Other paragraphs on the approach which appear in Dispatch, Chief, EE to Chief, Munich, 16 July 1962; and in Dispatch, Chief [excised] to Chief [excised], 12 Mar. 1963, both in the Erich Rajakowitsch Name File, remain classified. No documents from 1959 describing the project for which Rajakowitsch was considered a suitable lead or the actual report on the CIA's meeting with him have been released.

133. Munich to Director, 29 June 1962, NA, RG 263, ibid. The identity of the service that requested the traces is redacted in the file. It is assumed this is the West German government, given the nearby location of the West German foreign intelligence service's [BND] headquarters; "Traces on Dr. Erich Rajakowitsch," 12 Mar. 1963, ibid.

139. This is mentioned in the brief supportive of Rajakowitsch acquired by the CIA. See Attachment 1, Chief [excised] to Chief [excised], 23 Dec. 1964, ibid.

140. Dispatch, Chief [excised] to Chief [excised], 23 Dec. 1964, "Eric Rajacovich aka Raja aka Erick Rajokowic aka Enrico Raja," ibid. This document, with the substitute language "foreign official" and "codeword," was released as the result of an IWG request for a re-review of the Rajakowitsch Name File in 2002.

141. Cable, Vienna to DOS, 5 Mar. 1965, ibid.

142. A false-flag recruitment involves making the agent assume he is working for an intelligence service other than the one that is actually doing the hiring.

145. See the Pincer Report, "Former Official of Lithuanian Political Police under German Occupation /Gestapo/now in Bamburg/M50-024," 10 Apr. 1947.

146. The precise nature of Lileikis' work for the CIA remains unclear, but the duration alone and the fact that the CIA did nor help him get into the United States suggests that Lileikis was not the recruiter that he was expected to be.

147. Richard Helms, interview with author, 12 Mar. 1991.

148. Among the 743 Name Files released by the CIA are other examples of CIA Cold War recruitment of former SS men. See the Robert Ancans, Heinrich Bandholz, Friedrich Carstenn, Eduard Fischer, Karl Otto Jobke, Hans Otto, Nikolai Poppe, Hans Rues, Hans Seebolde, Eberhard Tellkamp, and Helmut Vogt Name Files, all in NA, RG 263. The Arturs Brombergs, Xhafer Deva, Hasan Dosti, Jose Garrette, Wilhelm Gruenwaldt, Peteris Janelsins, Mikola Lebed, Walter Mehnert, Radislaw Ostrowsky, and Stanislaw Stankiewicz Name Files provide examples of individuals recruited by the CIA who, though not SS veterans, nevertheless had criminal pasts in World War II.